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RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY; 



OB, 



THE SUBJECTIVE IDEA AND OBJECTIVE LAW 
OF ALL INTELLIGENCE. 



LAUKENS P. HICKOK, D.D., 



UNION COLLEGE. 



A NEW AND REVISED EDITION. 



NEW YORK: 

IYISON, PHINNEY & CO., 48 & 50 WALKER ST. 

CHICAGO : S. C. GRIGGS & CO., 39 & 41 LAKE ST. 

BOSTON : BEOWN A TAGGARD. PHILADELPHIA : SOWER, BARNES & CO., AND J. B. 

LIPPINCOTT&CO. CINCINNATI : MOORK, WILSTACH, KEYS & CO. SAVANNAH: 

J. M. COOPER A CO. ST. L0TTI8 : KEITH 4 WOODS. "NEW ORLEANS: 

B. B. STEVENS A CO. DETROIT : RAYMOND & LAPHAM. 

1861. 



^ 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1861, by 

LAURENS P. HICKOK, D.D., 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the 

Northern District of New York, 



2- 3 3 °f 



1 



stereotyped by 

Smith & McDougal 

82 & 84 Beekman-st. 



PRINTED BY 

D. Bedford & Co., 
115 Franklin-street 



PBEFACE 



" It is neither necessary nor possible that all men should 
be philosophers." A spontaneous intelligence begins in 
childhood, and is altogether absorbed in the experience of 
the varied phenomena of the senses. In this respect, most 
men perpetuate their childhood through life, and never rise 
above a spontaneous intelligence. They perceive that which 
appears in the light of the common consciousness, and de- 
duce more or less practical conclusions from experience ; 
but a few minds only of a generation turn themselves back 
upon consciousness itself, and reflect upon what and how 
experience must be, and make the conditioning principles 
of all intelligence the subject of patient and profound inves- 
tigation. The capability to rise into the higher light of a 
purely philosophical consciousness, and become familiar with 
a priori principles and transcendental demonstrations, de- 
pends so entirely upon the free energizing of the spiritual 
and the self-controlling of the rational in man, that it be- 
comes a vain hope to find but few in an age to whom such 
a position is attainable, and for whom such exercises in pure 
thought possess any interest. No one, who would explain 
the process or present the results of his investigation in this 
field, should expect the multitude to give any attention to 
his communication ; yet the ready sympathy of all who are 
engaged in these common studies, and the reciprocations of 
a deep and serene interest in every kindred spirit, may give 



IV PREFACE. 

confidence to any one who has his message to deliver, that 
if he will but give it utterance in clear voice he shall in such 
" fit audience find though few." 

A perfect philosophy must be universally comprehensive. 
False principles and wrong processes necessitate an erro- 
neous philosophy ; while partial principles and processes of 
demonstration, though not false, must yet give a defective 
philosophy. If we use no element other than truth, and 
thus avoid a false system ; still, until Ave have comprehended 
all its truth, we have not attained to the perfected system 
of science. It would, doubtless, be an arrogant assumption 
for any one, at the present age, to affirm that from his stand- 
point all truth may be discovered and a full encyclopedia of 
science may from thence be ensphered. Each thinker attains 
a portion only of all truth, and as it is viewed from his posi- 
tion ; and it can only be from the collected attainments of 
many, that we gradually mount to higher stations and reach 
to more comprehensive conclusions. Not the man, but 
thinking humanity, is the true philosopher. The tributary 
streams of ages go to make up the full flow of philosophic 
thinking, and at length this may pour itself into what yet, 
to finite intelligence, shall ever be a shoreless ocean. 

The preparation and publication of this work has been 
under the full influence of these considerations. It is not 
expected that it will be of any interest to the many ; suffi- 
cient quite, if it reach and occupy the minds of the few, and 
propagate its reciprocations of free thought through the 
growing number of such as can and do familiarize them- 
selves in purely rational demonstrations. Nor has it been 
deemed that there is here a perfected and universally com- 
prehensive philosophy ; though it is believed that the true 
direction is here taken, and it is also hoped that some pro- 
gress has been gained, towards the ultimate attainment of 
that position from which the complete science of all sciences, 
if ever to be consummated, must at length be perfected. It 
is intended only as a contribution to the common current of 



PREFACE. y 

rational philosophic speculation, and is silently cast into t^e 
stream of thought to flow on with it if found to be conge- 
nial, or to be thrown ashore if it prove only as a foreign 
cumbering drift upon its surface. 

Thus far was the Preface to the original form of the 
Rational Psychology. In its present form regard has been 
taken to the growing acquaintance of the thinking mind 
with these speculations, and also to the demand that more 
attention be given to their study in the higher classes of our 
colleges. Some modifications have thus been made of par- 
ticular parts, but not in the general method. This had been 
too comprehensively thought out to admit of any change. 
Rational psychology must give the accordant idea and law 
through all the functions of intelligence in the sense, the 
understanding and the reason. But in the determination of 
such necessity, it is not now needed that there be a formal 
laying of the groundwork, and we thus dispense with what 
was given in Book First, and avoid the undesirable division 
of the work into two books. The acquired familiarity with 
pure cognitions permits also the passing by of such parts as 
were designed merely to facilitate the ready use of such cog- 
nitions, specially the relations of space and time to phenom- 
ena and of each to the other, and also remarks in several 
places designed only to show the distinction of view in this 
work from Aristotle, Kant, and others. 

In the application of the results of psychology to on- 
tology, appended to each part, there has been a more spe- 
cific appropriation of the proof for real being as belonging 
respectively to the sense and to the understanding. For the 
clearer conceptions of physical substance and cause, and 
more especially of the origination of nature from the Abso- 
lute Creator, the conception of force as the basis for all 
philosophical thought in the understanding, and as the 
essence of all material being, has also been more carefully 
and completely presented. Many minor modifications have, 



VI PREFACE. 

moreover, frequently been made, designed to improve the 
work in clearness and completeness. 

The complaint of obscurity from peculiarity of style and 
terms arises from the nature of the speculation, and nothing 
but more familiarity with this field of thinking can make any 
presentation by language to be perspicuous. No words will 
put the thoughts over into the empty and passive mind, but 
the mind must come to the language with some previous 
preparation in its habits of thinking to enable it to discern 
and take the thought there contained. To the familiar mind 
the work is not open to the criticism of obscurity, either 
from style or terminology. The vague reproaches in the 
charges of transcendentalism and German speculation need 
no other reply than the emphatic affirmation that whatever 
danger or error there may be in transcendentalism or Ger- 
manism, these are not to be overcome by any timid ignoring 
or any valorous denouncing of them. They are to be put 
down in no other manner than by fairly meeting and fully 
refuting or correcting them in their own methods. 

The work has done more than was anticipated for it in 
awaking and directing thought, and it is given in this re- 
vised form from the conviction that its use is still needed to 
the same ends, and especially as a text or reference book in 
the higher philosophical instruction of our colleges. 

Union College, 1861. 



CONTENTS 



pact 
Introduction 13 

1. What Rational Psychology is 14 

2. The Ends to which the Conclusions of Rational Psychology 

may be subservient 26 



KATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 

General Method 11 

PAKT I. 

THE SENSE. 
Definitions and Specific Method T? 

CHAPTER I. 

THE SENSE IN ITS SUBJECTIVE IDEA. 

FIRST DIVISION. 
the idea in the pure intuition. 

§ I.— -The Attainment of an a priori Position 81 

1. The Primitive Intuition for all Phenomena of an External 

Sense 84 

2. The Primitive Intuition for all Phenomena of an Internal 

Sense 86 

§ II — The Process of an a priori construction of Real Form 

in Pure Space and Time 91 

1. The Construction of Real Form in Pure Space 93 

2. The Construction of Real Form in Pure Time 95 

§ III. — The Primitive Elements of all possible Forms in Pure 

Space and Time 1 98 

1. Unity 99 

2. Plurality 101 

3. Totality , 102 



Vlll CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

§ IV.— The Unity op Self-Consciousness 105 

1. More than Simple Act 106 

2. More than Unity of Conjoining Agency 106 

3. More than Unity of Agency and Unity of Consciousness 110 

SECOND DIVISION. 

THE IDEA IN THE EMPIRICAL INTUITION. 

§ I.— The Attainment op an a priori Position through a Pro- 

lepsis 117 

§ n. — The Primitive Elements op all Possible Anticipation 

op Appearance in the Sense \ 120 

1. Reality 122 

2. Particularity 123 

3. Peculiarity 124 

§ . III. — The a priori Determination of what Diversity there 

MUST BE IN ALL QUALITY 127 

1. Intensive 129 

2. Extensive ' 130 

3. Protensive 131 

§ IV. — The Construction of the Homogeneous Diversity of all 

possible Quality into Form 132 

1. Diversity as Intensive 1 35 

2. Diversity as Extensive . 136 

3. Diversity as Protensive. 138 

§ V. — The Conclusive Determination of the Sense in its Sub- 
jective Idea 143 

Other representations of the Sense 145 

. CHAPTER II. 

THE SENSE IN ITS OBJECTIVE LAW. 

§ I. — Transcendental Science is conditioned upon a Law in 

the Pacts conformed to an a priori Idea 154 

§ II— The Colligation of Facts 159 

1. Facts connected with Obscure Perception 161 

2. The Relative Capabilities of the different Organs of Sense 166 

3. Deceptive Appearance. 177 



CONTENTS. IX 

PAGB 

§ III.— The Consilience of Facts 184 

Drawing and Painting 186 

Spy-Glass and Engraved Figures 191 

Perspective and Dioramic Eepresentations 192 

APPENDIX TO THE SENSE. 

An Ontological Demonstration of the Valid Being of the Phe- 
nomenal 197 

1. Of the Inner Phenomena 198 

2. Of the Outer Phenomena 200 



PAKT II. 

THE UND E R, S T A. IN" 33 I IST Gr . 

I. The Necessity for a Higher Intellectual Agency than any 

in the Sense 203 

II. The Exposition of this Higher Agency as Understanding. . 207 

CHAPTER I. 

THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS SUBJECTIVE IDEA. 

§ I. — The Understanding necessarily Discursive 213 

§ II, — Space and Time the necessary Media for Determining 

Connection through a Discursus 221 

§ HI. — Space and Time exclude all Determined Experience 

EXCEPT THROUGH THE CONNECTIONS OF THE NOTIONAL 227 

1. The Phenomena only may be given, and we may attempt to 

Construct their Places and Periods by them 228 

2. The one Whole of Space and of Time may be assumed, and 

the Attempt made to Determine Phenomenal Places and 
Periods by them 230 

3. The Supposition that perhaps a Notional Connective for the 

Phenomena may determine these Phenomena in their 
Places and Periods in the whole of Space and of Time, 
and so may give both the Phenomena and their Space and 
Time in an Objective Experience 237 



X CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

§ IV.— The Primitive Elements or the Operation op Connec- 
tion, giving a Possible Experience Determined in Space 
and Time 238 

1. In Space : Substance and Accidence 239 

2. In Time: as having Three Modes:— 243 

Perpetual Time : Source and Event 246 

Successive Time : Cause and Effect 249 

* Simultaneous Time : Action and Eeaction 252 

§ Y. — Some of the a priori Principles in a Nature of Things. 256 

1. Substance: giving Permanence, Impenetrability, Inertia, etc. 258 

2. Cause: giving a Change in Things, a Train of Events, etc 267 

3. Action and Eeaction : giving Co-existence, Concomitance, etc. 278 

§ VI. — False Systems of a Universal Nature Exposed in 

their Delusive a priori Conditions 282 

1. When the Phenomenal is Elevated to a Notional in the Un- 

derstanding 286 

2. When the Notional is Degraded to a Vague Phenomenal, or 

entirely Excluded 310 

CHAPTER II. 

% 

THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS OBJECTIVE LAW. 

§ I. — Space and Time each as a whole 330 

§ II. — The Determination of Experience in one whole of 

Space and of Time , 332 

1. Experience in Universal Space 333 

2. Experience in Universal Time 340 

§ III. — The Determination of an Experience in its Particular 

Places and Periods 346 

1. Particular Determination of Places in Space 347 

2. Particular Determination of Periods in Time 352 

APPENDIX TO THE UNDERSTANDING. 

An Ontological Demonstration of the Yalid Being of the 

Notional 370 

1. Idealism against Materialism 374 

2. Materialism against Idealism 376 

• 3. Accordance of Consciousness and Reason against Pyrrhonism. 380 



CONTENTS, Xi 

PART III. 

THE REA.SON. 

PAGE 

The Function and Province of the Reason 387 

CHAPTER I. 

THE REASON IN ITS SUBJECTIVE IDEA. 

§ I. — The Attainment of the Absolute, as an a peioei Posi- 
tion for the Reason 397 

§ II. — The Determination of Personality to the Absolute 411 

Primitive Elements of Comprehension : — 

1. Pure Spontaneity 415 

2. Pure Autonomy 420 

3. Pure Liberty. 438 

§ III. — The a priori Comprehension of Nature in the Pure 

Personality of the Absolute 446 

CHAPTER II. 

THE REASON IN ITS OBJECTIVE LAW. 

Finite and Absolute Personality 4G1 

§ I. — The Facts of a Comprehending Reason which come 

within the Compass of a Finite Personality 468 

1. ^Esthetic Facts 472 

2. Mathematical Facts 476 

3. Philosophical Facts 480 

4. Psychological Facts 483 

5. Ethical Facts 484 

§ IT. — The Facts of a Comprehending Reason which come 

within the Compass of an Absolute Personality 507 

1. Facts Evincive of a Universal Recognition of an Absolute Per- 

sonality 510 

2. The Fact of a Comprehending Operation for Universal Nature 

is only by the Compass of this Absolute Personality 529 



Xll CONTENTS. 

APPENDIX TO THE REASON. 

PAGE 

An Ontological Demonstration op the Valid Being op the 

Supernatural 540 

1. The Valid Being of the Soul 540 

2. The Valid Existence of God 542 

3. The Validity of the Soul's Immortality 542 



INTRODUCTION 



Psychology is the Science of Mind. Empirical Psy- 
chology attains the facts of mind and arranges them in a 
system. The elements are solely the facts given in experi- 
ence, and the criterion of their reality is the clear testimony 
of consciousness. When, between any number of minds 
there is an alleged contradiction of consciousness, the 
umpire is found in the general consciousness of mankind. 
What this general consciousness is, may be attained in vari- 
ous ways ; from the languages, laws, manners and customs, 
proverbial sayings, literature and history of the race ; and a 
fair appeal and decision here must be final, for any fact 
excluded thereby must be alter um genus, and should also 
be excluded from the philosophical system. Such an appeal 
to general consciousness may properly be termed the tribu- 
nal of Common Sense. 

Rational Psychology is a very different process for 
attaining to a Science of Mind, and lies originally in a very 
different field from experience, although it ultimately brings 
all its attainments within an experience. As this is the 
specific subject designed for present investigation, it is im- 
portant as preliminary thereto, that we attain a clear appre- 
hension of what it is ; and it may also be of advantage to 



14 INTRODUCTION. 

examine some of the ends to which it may be applied, and 
thus beforehand see some of the uses to which it may be 
made subservient. 

I. An explanation of what Rational Psychology is. 

In this science, we pass from the facts of experience 
wholly out beyond it, and seek for the rationale of experi- 
ence itself in the necessary and universal principles which 
must be conditional for all facts of a possible experience. 
We seek to determine how it is possible for an experience 
to be, from those a priori conditions which render all the 
functions of an intellectual agency themselves intelligible. 
In the conclusions of this science it becomes competent for 
us to affirm, not as from mere experience we may, that this 
is — but, from these necessary and universal principles, that 
this must be. The intellect is itself investigated and known 
through the principles which must necessarily control all its 
agency, and thereby the intellect itself is expounded in its 
constituent functions and laws of operation. 

An illustration of what such a Science of Mind is, may 
be given by a reference to other things as subjects of 
rational comprehension. Whatever may be placed in the 
double aspect of its empirical facts and its conditional prin- 
ciples, may be used for such a purpose. Thus Astronomy 
has its sublime and astonishing facts, gathered through a 
long period of patient and careful observation. Experience 
has been competent to attain the appearances and move- 
ments of the heavenly bodies ; the satellites of some of the 
planets, and their relations to their primaries ; the apparent 
changes of figure and place in some, and the occasional tran- 
sits or occultations of others. The general relations of dif- 



WHAT RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY IS. 15 

ferent portions of our solar system have in this way been 
found; the sun put in its place at the center, the planets put 
in their places in their orbits around it, with the direction, 
distance, and time of periodical revolution accurately deter- 
mined. A complete diagram of the solar system may thus 
be made from the results of experience alone, and all that 
belongs to formal Astronomy be finished. In this process, 
through experience, we are competent to affirm, so the solar 
system is. But if now, on the other hand, beyond experi- 
ence, we may somehow attain to the cognition of an invisi- 
ble force, which must work through the system directly as 
the quantity of matter and inversely as the squares of the 
distance, we shall be competent to take this as an a priori 
principle, determining experience itself, and quite independ- 
ently of all observation may affirm, so the solar system 
must be. 

Again, I take a body of a triangular form, and by accu- 
rate mensuration find that any two of its sides are together 
greater than the third side. Another triangular body, of 
different size and proportion of its sides, is also accurately 
measured, and the same fact is again found. The mensura- 
tion of the first did not help to the attainment of the fact in 
the last, but an experiment only ascertained that so it is. 
Repeated experiments may have been made of a vast num- 
ber of triangular forms, isosceles, right-angled, and scalene, 
and of them all, at last, I may make the same affirmation, 
this is ; but from experience I am not warranted to include 
any thing else than so it is, and in so many cases as the 
experiment has reached. When, however, I construct for 
myself a triangle in pure space, and intuitively perceive the 
relations of its sides, I do not need any experiment, but can 



16 INTRODUCTION. 

make this intuition valid universally, and affirm for all possi- 
ble triangles, so the facts must be. 

Such everywhere is the distinction between an empirical 
and a rational process. In the one we have the facts as 
they appear ; in the other, we have the conditioning princi- 
ple which determines their appearance, and which makes 
our experience of them possible. And now, the human 
mind, as an intelligent and free agent, may as readily as any 
other subject, admit of an investigation under each of these 
aspects. Facts as given in experience, and those arranged 
in an orderly system as they appear in consciousness, consti- 
tute Pyschology in that important division which we have 
denominated Empirical: and those principles which give 
the necessary and universal laws to experience, and by 
which intelligence itself is alone made intelligible, are the 
elements for a higher Psychological Science which we term 
Rational. So far as this science is made to proceed, it will 
give an exposition of the human mind not merely in the 
facts of experience, but in the more adequate and compre- 
hensive manner, according to the necessary laws of its 
being and action as a free intelligence. It will, moreover, 
afford a position from which we may overlook the whole 
field of possible human science, and determine a complete 
circumscription to our experience: demonstrating what is 
possible, and the validity of that which is real. In it is the 
science of all sciences, inasmuch as it gives an exposition of 
Intelligence itself. 

Such, also, is truly a transcendental philosophy inasmuch 
as it transcends experience, and goes up to those necessary 
sources from which, all possible experience must originate ; 
but not transcendental in that sense in which the name has 



WHAT RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY IS. 17 

become a derision and reproach by the perversion of those 
who have assumed it and dishonored it, and with whom it 
has been a transcending of all light and meaning, and going 
off into a region of mere dreams and shadows. A true 
transcendental philosophy dwells perpetually in the purest 
light, and sustains itself by the soundest demonstrations ; 
nor is it practicable, by any other method of investigation, 
to draw a clear line between empiricism and science, 
assumption and demonstration, facts which appear to be 
and principles which must be. 

Pure Mathematics, and, in a different field, pure Physics 
also, proceed in the firm and sure steps of a demonstrated 
science, because they go out utterly beyond all appearance, 
and attain their elements from a region transcending all that 
experience can reach. They deal with the necessary and 
the universal, and hence, as resting upon that which must 
control all experience and make it possible, it can never 
occur that any facts in experience should come in contradic- 
tion to them. Nor can any thing assumed to be philosophy 
and attempting to pass itself off as science, and least of all 
psychological science, take the high road of a sound and 
valid demonstration, except it shall both start from and lay 
its course by, the stern demand and rigid rule of necessary 
principles. True science must be both supported and 
directed by those ultimate truths, which are self-affirmed 
in their own light, and which both must be, and must 
everywhere and evermore be. An empirical system may 
defend itself and maintain its integrity against all that shall 
assail it from within ; but where the skeptic resolutely goes 
out beyond those assumptions which are conditional for it, 
and calls in question the stability of its very foundation, it 



18 INTROD UCTION. 

is utterly helpless. Thus, the telescope brings distant 
objects within the reach of observation, and thereby vastly 
enlarges the sphere of vision. By its aid we may go on 
in the addition of one newly discovered phenomenon to 
another in the broad fields of space, and enlarge the system 
embraced in experimental astronomy to the maximum of 
power which may be attained for our glasses. We need 
have no other solicitude for the validity of our system as 
empirical, save only in the assurance of a correct observa- 
tion. If any doubts spring up within the facts of our 
science, we can repeat the observation at pleasure and 
dispel them. But when, at length, we encounter the 
skeptic who will not shut himself up within our condi- 
tioning assumption of the validity of telescopic observation, 
and seriously questions the correctness of this whole man- 
ner of appearances, and of seeing new objects through 
magnifying glasses, most surely we shall avail nothing in 
attempting to cure tins skepticism by multiplying our 
experiments and making such objects to appear through 
the telescope, nor even by forcing the skeptic to the con- 
sciousness that he sees them there himself. He is assailing 
the system from a point utterly beyond all the facts of 
observation, and with fatal effect disturbing the integrity of 
astronomical science in its very foundation, and must needs 
be met in the very point of his doubts and forced to the 
conviction that the laws of telescopic vision are valid. 
And surely this can not be done by looking through the 
telescope, nor even by taking it to pieces and subjecting 
all its parts to careful inspection. We shall be obliged 
to attain those optical principles which are conditional for 
all making of telescopes, and thus know how telescopic 



WHAT RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY IS. 19 

vision is possible in its own conditioning laws, and deter- 
mine what must be by a rational demonstration, and in 
this process only can we force such an assailing skepticism 
from its position. 

As is the telescope an instrument for the eye, so is the 
eye, and all the organism of sense, an instrument for the 
intellect. While we are solicitous about the facts as they 
appear in the sense merely, we shall find no difficulty in 
building up our empirical system and maintaining the vali- 
dity of our philosophy. Yea, if we wish to take the 
mental organism itself in pieces and examine its varied 
phenomena, and put all together again according to 
observed connections and relationships, an empirical psy- 
chology may be thus readily attained, and a system of 
mental science completed. But when we meet with a 
skepticism which plants its objections back of all experi- 
ence, and doubts altogether about this whole matter of 
appearance in the senses, then are we doing absolutely 
nothing for science except as we also go back of experi- 
ence, and by a rigid transcendental demonstration deter- 
mine from the conditioning principles of all intelligence 
how experience in the senses is possible to be ; and then, by 
this, also demonstrate in the facts their validity, inasmuch 
as they are found actually to be, what from their condition- 
ing laws it has already been seen that they must be. There 
is a skepticism which resolutely and perseveringly questions 
all validity of experience, and doubts the whole testimony 
of consciousness relatively to the reality of all being ; yea, 
that founds itself upon an alleged contradiction of reason 
and consciousness, and thereby demonstrates the necessity 
of absolute and universal skepticism ; and while to such all 



20 INTRODUCTION. 

experience must be a mere seeming to be, with no reality, 
this can certainly never be cured by any repetition of 
appearances merely as they seem to be. A solid basis for 
science is here attainable by no other possible process than 
through the insight and conclusions of a Rational Psycho- 
logy. The want is both seen and felt, that something 
not of experience should be given, by which to demon- 
strate the validity of experience; nor will thinking minds 
be long deeply interested in any speculations which do 
not attempt, at least, to go up to the original and condi- 
tioning sources of all knowledge. 

The history of philosophy furnishes here ample instruc- 
tion. Those investigations only which have sought to rise 
to their conditioning principles, in reference to the subject 
in hand, have laid any very strong grasp upon the philo- 
sophical mind, or fixed the attention of thinking men for 
any long period. More especially is this true in reference 
to all philosophy which subjects the human mind to examin- 
ation, and gives its theory for expounding man's intellectual 
and moral agency. If the whole be left to repose upon the 
mere affirmations of common sense, and thus the whole 
science be circumscribed by the limits of general experience 
in consciousness, it can not meet this philosophical want, 
and will not hold the interest of philosophical minds. The 
point of all dangerous skepticism is wholly out of and 
beyond the experience in which common sense originates, 
and if this is not at all sought for, and the effort, at least, 
made to reach this point and demolish the skepticism, the 
influence of the work must be limited to those minds which 
have not yet seen the difficulty, and felt the need of a 
hjgher demonstration. Thus, whatever the subject under 



WHAT KATI0NAL PSYCHOLOGY IS. 21 

examination may be, the skepticism which endangers it as a 
philosophy will ever lie at its foundation, and can only be 
met by going back of its facts and giving validity to its 
conditioning principles ; and such studies as are directed to 
such a priori principles will alone possess any philosophical 
interest. 

This is the very spirit of the far-famed Socratic method 
of philosophizing, and in this lies its influence and its inter- 
est. By a series of skillful interrogatories, Socrates forced 
the disciple back to the elementary principles of the subject 
under discussion, and made him to seek some conditioning 
truth, clear in its own light, and on which all subsequent 
deductions might be seen to be safely dependent. The 
scholar was in this way made cautious and docile, and 
the sophist was driven to expose his own ignorance amid 
all his shallow pretensions. Plato, the most illustrious 
of his disciples, and the world's great teacher in philosophy, 
still more thoroughly pursued science up to her primitive 
sources. The Intellectual Idea was taken as the archetype 
and zVtforming essence, and only in this could facts be made 
intelligible, and by this only could nature be interpreted. 
Aristotle, in succession, no less rigidly forced philosophy 
upward to the science of first principles. His investiga- 
tions regarded the modes in which nature manifests herself 
in facts and phenomena, rather than the inherent forces and 
laws which condition her development ; yet it is only 
through these conditioning laws that any portion of nature 
can be adequately expounded. He sought rather to reduce 
science to its logical elements, and to find here the condi- 
tioning sources of all correct concluding in judgments. 
These sages of antiquity have held their power over the 



22 INTRODUCTION. 

philosophic thinking of ages, and their voice has penetrated 
through more than twenty centuries, and is still distinct to 
teach all who have ears to hear. 

The dialectical conflicts of the school-men, long exer- 
cised the minds of men in the most subtle and often empty 
speculation's, and ultimately exhausted all the resources of 
syllogistic disputation, and wearied the world with its 
abstract terms and dry logical distinctions. Descartes 
sought to bring back philosophy again to the study of 
things in their first principles. The germ of his system 
lies in the following extract : " It is absurd to suppose that 
which thinks not to be in the very time in which it thinks. 
And hence this cognition — I think, therefore I am — is the 
first and most certain which may occur to any one philoso- 
phizing in order." Thought, as the essence of spirit, and 
extension as the essence of matter, make up the universe of 
being, and as opposites and incommunicable in their own 
nature, are brought and held together in communion 
through the doctrine of " divine assistance." Spinoza iden- 
tified thought and extension in a higher substance, and 
made all modes of spiritual and material being only a mani- 
fested development of this higher existence. Leibnitz sub- 
limated all being into indivisible atoms, and as thus indis- 
tinguishable by any outer, they must be distinguished each 
from each by an inner peculiarity, and which, analagous to 
mind, is a faculty of representing. Every atom with its 
inner representation-force was thus a monad, and when rep- 
resenting in unconsciousness, is matter ; when partially con- 
scious, is animal ; when in full self-consciousness, is human 
soul ; and the Absolute Monad arranges all the representa- 
tions through a " preestablished harmony." 



WHAT RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY IS. 23 

Lord "Bacon, also, as the great modern expounder of 
Inductive Philosophy, urges to the investigation of nature 
not in scattered and isolated facts, but in their inherent 
laws which bind them together in systematic unity. An 
intellectual analysis into fact and law, matter and form, 
must be made through all subjects of science, and thus 
nature must be dissolved, not chemically by fire, but intel- 
lectually as by a divine lire. And Locke, again, turned his 
inquiry to primitive sources that he might accurately cir- 
cumscribe the entire field of human knowledge. While he 
has laid the foundation for only a very partial philosophy in 
the rejection of all a priori knowledge, yet from the force 
and clearness of his investigation of sensation and experi- 
ence, he has for more than a century and a half held sway 
over much the larger portion of the philosophic mind of 
Britain and America. Out of this system have arisen the 
idealism of Berkely, the vibration theory of Hartley, the 
materialism of Diderot and Helvetius, the universal skepti- 
cism of Hume, and, for the counteraction of the last, the 
common sense basis for all philosophy as assumed by Reid 
and most of the Scotch Metaphysicians. 

And once more only, it may emphatically be said that 
for more than half a century the deep and strong current of 
German thought has been impelled and directed in its 
course by the profound critical investigations of Kant, rela- 
tive to the origin and validity of all knowledge. He says, 
" Up to this time it has been received that all our cognition 
must regulate itself according to the objects; yet all 
attempts to make out something a priori by means of con- 
ceptions concerning such, whereby our cognitions would be 
extended, have proved under this supposition abortive 



24 INTRODUCTION. 

Let it be once, therefore, tried whether we do not succeed 
better in the problems of metaphysics, when we admit that 
the objects must regulate themselves according to our cog- 
nitions." This reversed order of investigation is the pecu- 
liarity of the Critical Philosophy, and is analogous to that 
change in* the stand-point for all investigation which 
occurred in astronomy, when the sun was put in the center 
of the system and the observer carried around it, instead of 
the spectator being himself at rest and the sun revolving. 
And we need to add merely this remark, that in general, 
whether as disciples or opponents of Kant, the thinking 
mind in Germany, and of those who have been aroused by 
German speculations, have found the interest of the investi- 
gations to lie in the deep and earnest search after determin- 
ing principles. Nor is this fact at all discredited by the 
querulous complaints and captious reproaches from such as 
find the ground of these speculations too high for the atten- 
tion they have given to them, since there is at least the 
interest to have seemed to have formed a judgment about 
that which they have not as yet at all comprehended. 

The prevailing system of metaphysics must necessarily 
strongly affect all cotemporary physical investigation, and 
very much mold all natural science after its own forms. 
All philosophy must strike its roots in the reason, and its 
first principles must be found or assumed from beyond the 
empirical, and entirely within the transcendental. The 
physical can find no law of exposition save in the metaphys- 
ical. It is in this field that the foundations of all systematic 
philosophy must be laid, for if these are assumptions solely, 
their conclusions, whether salutary or dangerous, can 
neither be sustained nor refuted by other assumptions. 



WHAT RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY IS. 25 

Assumption and counter-assumption may forever stand, the 
one over against the other, and there shall be no force in 
either to demolish its opposite. We must be able to go 
over into its metaphysical region, and secure here a legiti- 
mate possession, or we can never give to our assumed 
science authority in its own right to eject the intruding 
skeptic, nor forbid that he should any where at pleasure 
erect his fortifications in hostility. An empirical system, 
standing upon assumptions, can at the best only maintain 
itself in possession while its original right remains unques- 
tioned. When the title-deeds are contested in the grounds 
of their valid authority, it can not avail to produce any of 
the declarations and statements within them, but we must 
confirm their legitimacy by something beyond the instru- 
ment itself, and hold possession from the evidence that they 
reach back and take hold on the original powers of sover- 
eignty. The most incorrigible skepticism may remain 
utterly undisturbed in any philosophy, except as it is com- 
petent to give to its first principles a sound and clear a 
priori demonstration. 

And here we would remark, that it enters into the very 
essence of Rational Psychology, to make this a priori inves- 
tigation of the human intellect ; to attain the idea of intel- 
ligence, from the conditions which make an intellectual 
agency possible, and thereby determine how, if there be 
intelligence, it must be both in function and operation ; and 
then find the facts which shall evince that such intellectual 
agency is not only possible as idea in void thought, but is 
also actual as valid being in reality. Such an attainment in 
psychological science, may open the way to the determina- 
tion of the validity of all science, inasmuch as in this pro- 

2 



26 INTRODUCTION. 

i 

cess we attain the very laws of human intelligence itself, 
and may therefore use our position for determining the valid 
being of the objects given through such an intellectual 
agency. And this introduces another preliminary topic for 
examination, to which we will now turn our attention. 

II. The ends to which the conclusions of Rational 
Psychology may be rendered subservient. 

Rational Psychology is itself a science, and complete in 
its own department. It gives the Mind, through all its 
functions of intellectual agency, in the conditioning laws 
which control all its operations and interpret all its pro- 
cesses of knowledge ; and when thus completed it has filled 
its own measure and answered its own end. But interest- 
ing as is this Science of the Mind, and worthy to be pur- 
sued for its own sake, and competent to give satisfaction 
even when resting within its own conclusions, yet is there 
the opportunity of starting from its results, and making its 
conclusions subservient to further advances. It may be 
rendered directly instrumental in the solution of some of 
the most interesting and difficult problems within the whole 
compass of the sciences. Indeed, through no other process 
is it practicable to obtain a position, from whence some of 
the highest points in philosophy may be brought within the 
range of direct examination. 

There are many questions, involving the highest specula- 
tive and practical interests of mankind, which stand pre- 
cisely in this condition, that they receive a ready assent in 
the common conviction, and control the universal conduct 
of the world ; and yet when this universal assent is care- 
fully examined, and the effort is made to trace the convic- 



USES OF RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 27 

tion up to its original ground, it is found to rest wholly 
upon assumption. All attempts to elucidate the correctness 
and to settle the validity of such convictions, are soon 
found to be utterly impracticable except through some pro- 
cess of a rational investigation. All experimental processes 
must fail, for the point of difficulty lies beyond experiment, 
even in that which is conditional that there may be any 
experience. The attempt to forestall all such inquiry by 
affirming that such convictions are themselves ultimate 
facts, and not possible to be made any clearer by any efforts 
toward a higher investigation, inasmuch as these convic- 
tions are themselves the highest point of possible attain- 
ment, can not afford any satisfaction to philosophy, since it 
is really but affirming that all philosophy and science are 
impossibilities, and all knowledge is but a resting at last on 
mere arbitrary foundations. All that can be done is to say 
that so it appears, and as appearance gives this conviction 
which is our ultimate fact, we affirm that so it is ; and here 
we must stop short in all attempts to rise to any higher 
position where we may further affirm so it must be. When 
any one speculatively doubts the validity of these facts in 
experience, or even assumes to have proved them to be fal- 
lacious, there is nothing that can at all be answered, except 
still to urge this fact of universal belief from common sense, 
including the skeptic himself, and there rest as having 
reached the ultimate point of human attainment, and leave 
the skeptic to his doubts if he must still be so philosophical, 
and so little under the dominion of common sense, as to 
have them. The empirical philosopher and the reasoning 
skeptic, it is quite manifest, may here stand the one over 
against the other in perpetual contradiction, hopeless of all 



28 INTRODUCTION. 

reconciliation and agreement. Their respective positions 
perpetuate the everlasting conflict of two counter-assump- 
tions ; one, that the convictions of common sense are ulti- 
mate ; the other, that reason goes beyond all experience, 
or at least goes against it and falsifies its convictions. 
On his own premises each may maintain his own conclu- 
sions, and yet neither can go back to the assumption of his 
antagonist, and obtain a final triumph by demolishing it. 

And now, some of these very questions may be brought 
within the scope of a clear examination, from the position 
to which a Rational Psychology reaches. Having gained 
its own end, and given the human intellect as determined in 
a demonstrated science, it may be used for the further pur- 
pose of settling the conflicts of these counter-assumptions ; 
nor will it be practicable to make any thing else subservient 
to such a desirable issue. And it may subserve the double 
purpose of illustrating the great importance of a strictly 
transcendental philosophy, and by overlooking the field in 
general give a better preparation for our future exploration 
thereof, if we here make a particular and somewhat 
extended reference to some of the more important of these 
questions, in the exact order in which they stand related to 
the conclusions of a Rational Psychology. 

I. The objects given in sense are out of, and in some 
cases at a distance from, the knowing agent. This is 
especially true of the objects given by the sense of smell, 
of hearing, and of sight. One will suffice for the illustra- 
tion of all, and as the better adapted to a clear exemplifica- 
tion we will take the object as given in vision. The prob- 
lem which philosophy has felt herself called upon to solve is 
this : How may the intellect know that which is out of, 



USES OF RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 29 

and at a distance from, itself ? The general admission has 
been that in some way the object must affect the sensible 
organ by impulse. An impression is thereby made upon, 
or an affection produced within the organism, which by its 
nervous susceptibility perpetuates the affection and commu- 
nicates it to the brain, and through the brain the affection is 
carried up to the point of its communication with the intel- 
ligent spirit, and there in the secret penetralium of the 
spirit's dwelling-place a junction is formed between the 
invading impulse and the receiving intellect, the mind 
thereby attains its knowledge of the object, and the pro- 
cess of perception is completed. But, inasmuch as nothing 
can act except where it is, and when it is ; and the object is 
not where the point of the mind's receiving agency is, but 
sometimes at a great distance therefrom ; it follows that 
there must at ^his point of perception be some representa- 
tive of the distant object. This representative is what is 
directly perceived, and by it the distant object is made 
known. Such a theory modified in minor particulars by 
different philosophers, induced the necessary conclusion that 
all knowledge of an outer world is mediate, through repre- 
sentatives of its objects, and never direct as an immediate 
perception of the objects themselves. 

In the investigations to which this theory of representa- 
tive perception of objects was subjected, many perplexing 
queries arose, and different philosphers answered them, 
each in his own way, as he best could. What is this 
representative of the outer object — a spiritual or a material 
being? Is it an image of the object as excerpt and 
detached from it ? or originated in the brain ? or in the 
intellect? or in some media between the object and the 



30 INTRODUCTION. 

organ ? Does the representative at all exist when the mind 
is unconscious of the perception ? May it not be a direct 
creation and infused into the mind by divine agency ? Yea, 
may not these representatives be in the Deity, and identical 
with the divine essence, and that thus, according to the 
theory of Malebranche, " we see all things in God ?" But 
however these connected queries may have been answered, 
the general doctrine of perception remained, that not the 
object but some representative thereof w T as immediately 
given to the sense. From this a two-fold skepticism 
naturally arose, one or the other face being presented 
according to the side on which the theory was carried 
out to its issue. 

On one side, this theory of mediate perception gave 
occasion for a skepticism in reference to the reality of all 
external objects. How can the correctness of our percep- 
tions be at all determined ? If we say the representative is 
like the object, it can be only a mere assumption, inasmuch 
as no comparison can be instituted between them, for the 
representative only is given ; and if by any means the 
object could be attained for a comparison, then would the 
representative and all comparison with it be wholly super- 
fluous. Yea, inasmuch as the representatives are all that the 
intellect possesses, how is it possible that we may know 
that any thing other than the representatives really exist ? 
The representative is indeed the only object in conscious- 
ness. Berkeley's argument is still more stringently drawn. 
All that can be known is through the mediate representa- 
tions of sensation ; and all that can come within conscious- 
ness is the sensation itself; and this sensation as wholly 
mental can have no likeness to any material objective being. 



USES OF RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 31 

To suppose that mental sensations and material objects can 
resemble each other would confound mind and matter 
together. The conclusion, in his own language, necessarily 
follows : "The existence of a body out of a mind perceiv- 
ing it is not only impossible and a contradiction in terms, 
but were it possible and even real, it were impossible that 
the mind should ever know it." 

This conclusion of Bishop Berkeley was not at all the 
offspring of a religious skepticism. By giving up the 
knowledge of an outer material world and holding on to 
the knowledge of an inner mental world, he assumed that 
the skepticism in religion, which follows so readily and in 
his view so necessarily from the theory that inert matter 
can become a mental idea, was wholly avoided. By exclud- 
ing all knowledge of matter he thought to save the knowl- 
edge of the soul, and thereby a firm ground for the doc- 
trines and duties and immortal hopes of religion. And 
thus it was that on this side, the doctrine of mediate per- 
ception terminated in Idealism — or, more correctly, Sensa- 
tionalism — which denies all knowledge of the reality of 
objective being, save as it exists in the sensations of the 
mind itself. 

On the other side, this theory produced to its issue 
attains to a skepticism still more startling. The impres- 
sion made by the outer object, and acting upon the nicely 
arranged organism of the sense, puts in motion the animal 
spirits or gives vibration to the nervous and cerebral fila- 
ments, and thereby propagates its peculiar motions and 
manifestations onward to the sensorium, in which the sen- 
sation becomes perfected in a complete perception. But, 
inasmuch as no motion extending throughout any material 



32 INTK O D U CTI O X. 

organization may at all propagate its movement beyond 
what is material in the organic sphere, so there can be 
no possible projection of any representation of the object 
by such motion out of the organism and into some supposed 
spiritual receptacle, which as without parts must be utterly 
incompetent to receive or transmit any representation by 
impulse. The representative of the outer object can never 
be carried beyond the sphere of the material organization, 
and therefore all perception by means of this representation 
must be completed somewhere within the material organ- 
ization itself. All perception is perfected in the subtle, 
refined, yet still material organism. An impinging force 
from without communicates its impulse to the material 
arrangements within, and in the peculiar modification thus 
given to these organic particles, there originate perceptions, 
feelings, and thoughts. Various explanations may be made 
in reference to the manner how, but all spiritual agency is 
excluded, from the necessity that impulses and motions 
must be wholly material. " Consciousness itself," says 
Hobbes, " is the agitation of our internal organism, deter- 
mined by the unknown motions of a supposed outer world." 
Thought is the product of sublimated and skillfully arranged 
particles of matter put in motion by the representative of 
some outer object. To reverse the process, and begin with 
the completed perception tracing it backwards, will also 
arrive at the same conclusion after the manner of Diderot 
and the school of the French Encyclopedists. Every cog- 
nition w r hen carried back in its ultimate analysis must 
resolve itself into some sensible representation ; that which 
produced this representation in the sense must have come 
within the organization from some external impression or 



USES OF EATIOSAL PSYCHOLOGY. 33 

affection ; and thus all which may ever be in possession of 
the intellect, and Avhich is not wholly a chimera, must be 
able to again be attached to its own original archetype. 
Thus on this side philosophy is forced to Materialism, the 
doubting of all but material being. 

And here we may say, that the rational psychology of 
sense may be made subservient to the demonstration of all 
that sense gives to us. Spiritual acts and material qualities 
can be proved truly to appear. The sense can give no men- 
tal essence nor material substance, and from its psychology 
w r e can prove the being of neither ; but we may demon- 
strate a true appearance of mental exercises and material 
qualities and events. 

II. There is a more important end in the destruction of a 
still deeper skepticism to which the results of this science 
may be applied, and which will be disclosed in the follow- 
ing remarks : 

The sense is a medium for perception in which are given 
the qualities of an outer, and the exercises of an inner 
world. Colors, sounds, tastes, etc., are revealed in con- 
sciousness through sensation ; and thinking, feeling, choos- 
ing, etc, are also revealed in consciousness through an inner 
sense. All these accidents of an outer world of matter and 
an inner world of mind, as given in perception, may be 
demonstrated as realities from the results of rational 
psychology in its determination of the laws of perception. 
But, while much is attained for science in demonstrating the 
validity of our perceptions, there are still more important 
regions beyond, yet insecurely held in possession by philos- 
ophy. "We have thus the reality of the thinking, but not 
the thinker ; the reality of color, but not the thing colored. 

2* 



34 INTRODUCTION. 

w 

The accidents are known but not that in which the acci- 
dents inhere. All qualities as given in sense stand discon- 
nected, and can not by perception alone be put together in 
their existence as the common properties of one and the 
same subject. I perceive a redness, a fragrance, a silky 
smoothness ; but I do not perceive through sense that in 
which they all inhere as one tiling — the rose — so that I can 
say I perceive the rose as a thing in itself, and then more- 
over perceive that the rose is red, fragrant, smooth, etc. 
I perceive in the inner sense that there is a thinking, feel- 
ing, and choosing ; but I do not perceive the mind, and then 
perceive this one mind to think, feel, and choose. It is only 
through a discursive judgment that I can connect them in 
one common subject; and the sense does not judge, it only 
perceives. It may be made valid for real qualities and 
events, but it can never attain substances and causes. 

And now, it is by these notions of substance and cause 
that we can extend our knowledge at all beyond the mere 
isolated qualities as they appear in sense. "VV r e put the sev- 
eral qualities, not merely into one group as in the same 
place, but into one substance as existing in the same thing ; 
and also the events, not merely as successive in a time, but 
as originating in one cause as the same source. And when 
we thus connect qualities and events as perceived, in their 
notions of substance and cause as understood, we may 
then greatly extend our knowledge in several ways. Had 
we the faculty of perception tjirough sense alone, we could 
merely attain the predicates of qualities, as less and more, 
like and unlike, outer and inner, antecedent and consequent, 
etc., and which stand only in the conjunctions of space and 
time ; but by the faculty of the understanding which con- 



USES OF RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 35 

nects qualities as existing in things, we attain these quali- 
ties as the predicates of substances, and thereby a great 
enlargement of judgment is effected. 

Thus, in my notion of substance in which the qualities 
inhere, I have the conception of body ; and by simple 
reflection upon this conception I can say that all bodies 
must have extension, figure, position, divisibility, impene- 
trability, etc., as primary qualities. And in the same way, 
in my notion of cause, I have the conception of an agent, 
and by merely reflecting upon this conception I may say 
that all agents must have force, activity, passivity, etc., as 
their primary attributes. And in this I have not mere 
predicates of qualities, but predicates of things. And then, 
moreover, I may add to such things, all the qualities which 
the perceptions of the sense can attain, as their secondary 
qualities. Thus of some body — gold — in addition to the 
primary qualities common to all bodies, I may say from the 
perceptions of sense, that it is yellow, fusible, malleable, 
soluble in aqua regia, etc. ; and of some agent — the sun — 
that it has not only the primary attributes common to all 
agents, but also that it imparts light and heat, melts wax, 
hardens clay, converts liquids into vapor, etc. In this way 
I may enlarge my knowledge of things as far as I may 
extend my perceptions, and know not merely appearances 
as perceived, but things as understood. And much further 
still ; I may say that like substances have like qualities ; and 
that like causes produce like effects ; and may then classify 
nature through all her genera, species and varieties; and 
also by an induction of similar facts conspiring to one end, 
may deduce general laws, and thus extend my conclusions 



36 INTRODUCTION, 

not only to embrace what I have perceived, but all that it is 
possible should be perceived in nature. 

Here is the basis of Inductive Science. I assume this 
uniformity in the substances and causes of the universe, 
and thus conceive of nature as bound in harmony by uni- 
versal laws, and have then no difficulty in concluding from 
what is, to what will be ; and from what I have perceived, 
to what perception could any where give in any experi- 
ence. I may take some hypothesis, and using this for the 
time as if it were the true law of nature, I go out to exam- 
ine and question nature through all her works. If I find 
her answers quite contradictory to my hypothesis, I throw 
it away as worthless and false; but if I find her answers in 
conformity with my hypothesis, it is hypothesis no longer, 
but a veritable law of nature, by which she is henceforth to 
be interpreted through all her secret chambers. I may, 
again, be observing the casual facts of nature as they arise 
promiscuously around me, and with the conviction that 
there is some law of order though wholly as yet undiscov- 
ered, there may from some conspiring incidents perhaps, a 
thought sudden as inspiration flash upon my mind, in which 
the whole complexity of facts is put at once in clear and 
systematic unity. So Harvey, amid the promiscuous facts 
of anatomical dissection, notices the valves which open and 
close within the different chambers of the heart, and as the 
concurring facts appear, that these valves are so arranged 
that they may admit the blood coming from the veins, and 
then with every pulsation send it through the lungs and 
onward to the arteries; instantaneously, the fact of the 
circulation of the blood in the animal system, and the law 
for it, are clearly apprehended. So, also, the falling apple 



USES OF RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 37 

might, as is sometimes said it did, suggest to Newton's 
wakeful thought the universal action of gravitation. That 
force of attraction which brought the apple to the earth, 
manifestly reaches much higher than to the bough from 
which it fell ; why not then to the height of the air, and 
hold to the earth its surrounding atmosphere ? Why not 
to the moon, and control her changes ? Yea, why not act 
from the sun through all the system, and hold each planet 
in its orbit ? A careful induction confirms the supposition, 
and determines the ratio of the force, and at once the law 
of gravitation is assumed to pervade the universe. The 
revolutions of the furthest planet and the wandering of the 
most eccentric comet are subjected to its control. 

But here, the grand inquiry essential for all knowledge, 
both in the particular things of experience and the general 
judgments of induction, is to be made and answered. 
How shall these notions of substance and cause be verified? 
It is not sufficient that the perception has been plain, nor 
that we have been careful to secure a broad induction of 
facts before we have defined the particular thing, or 
deduced the general law. Such considerations are impor- 
tant merely in reference to the modus operandi, and the 
determination of the correctness of the process. We need 
to go back of the process, and examine the conditioning 
principle. How do we attain the validity of substance and 
cause ? How do we determine their uniformity ? By 
what right do we assume that nature has universal laws ? 
That in a large induction of facts such an order has been 
found, will not be ground sufficient to conclude, therefore, 
this order is necessary and universal — experience has been 
thus hitherto, therefore it must be such evermore. Experi- 



38 INTKODUCTION. 

ence itself is based upon the connections of substances and 
causes, inasmuch as without them, all perception is only of 
the isolated and fleeting qualities and events with nothing 
to connect such in a unity of nature ; and here we have not 
only assumed them for connecting qualities into things, but 
also have assumed their uniformity for connecting things in 
a general law of nature. Have we, then, a firm ground on 
which to stand, when we thus attempt to go out beyond 
the province of the sense ? The grand question is, how 
come we by the notions of substances and causes ? and 
especially, how come we by their perpetual order of connec- 
tion ? The results of reflection ; the truth of experience ; 
the validity of all thinking in judgments ; and the entire 
superstructure of inductive science ; all rest entirely upon 
the answer which may be given to such a comprehensive 
inquiry. If we can find a firm foundation on which to rest 
an affirmative in this matter, then is a science of experience 
and of nature possible ; if not, the most that is within our 
reach is probability and belief, and the whole region of 
Natural Philosophy is open to the skeptic. 

But from the philosophy of sensation, according to the 
system of Locke, no such foundation can be attained. Sen- 
sation is the medium for attaining qualities ; and by com- 
paring, abstracting, or combining these, we may attain such 
predicates as greater and less, even and odd, likeness and 
unlikeness, etc., in which the subject must always be the 
quality according to its modifications ; but certainly, no 
such modification of the quality can attain to a subject for it, 
and put the quality in a judgment as the predicate of such 
subject. The substance and cause are not at all given in 
the sensation, and can not possibly come within the light of 



USES OF EATIOXAL PSYCHOLOGY. 39 

consciousness ; and it would be wholly an illusion to sup- 
pose that because in our thinking we have the notions of 
substance and cause with the qualities j>erceived by sense, 
therefore they have been given in the qualities as perceived, 
and taken by an abstraction out of them. They are no 
modifications of, nor abstractions from, the qualities and 
events as perceived through sensation ; but are themselves 
the conditional grounds for all qualities and sources for 
all events, and are wholly out of and beyond all that 
can be made to appear in our consciousness. And yet, 
taking this illusion as a reality, and assuming thence that 
substances and causes are given in sensation and taken by 
abstraction from it, this philosophy is forced to convict 
itself of the further absurdity, that what is given in sensa- 
tion may be taken as a universal law reaching beyond what 
has been perceived, and determining how that must be 
which, has not been perceived ; inasmuch as it assumes a 
universal uniformity of their qualities and effects, in the 
like substances and causes. 

Hume, resting upon the basis of the philosophy of sen- 
sation, saw this inconsequence very clearly, and established 
a skepticism thereon utterly impregnable to any attacks 
from this philosophy. All that can be known is given in 
sensation ; and this is solely " impressions," or the less dis- 
tinct " ideas," which are the copies of the impressions in 
reflection. These " impressions," which include all our 
primary sensations, and in which we have all the qualities 
of an outer world and all the exercises of the mental 
world, may follow consecutively, and in these sequences 
we may determine an antecedent and consequent, but the 
mere sequence is all that is given. "No reflection upon 



40 INTRODUCTION. 

the sequence can attain to any causal nexus which neces- 
sitates this order of antecedents and consequents. Such 
sequences are and have been together, but in this there 
is no possible ground for the conclusion that they will 
be, much less that they must be together hereafter. This 
efficiency, as necessary connection, is not in the "impres- 
sion" as attained in sensation, and hence no reflection 
can attain to causation as the "idea" or copy thereof. 

This most acute of all skeptics both saw and admitted 
the fact, that the human mind in some way attained 
the seeming conviction that this connection was a neces- 
sary one ; and yet, as manifestly such could not be 
given in sensation, and therefore could not be knowl- 
edge, he quite ingeniously and as philosophically as the 
system of sensation will admit, attempts to account for 
such conviction. It is solely the result of habit, from the 
frequent repetition of the impression of the sequences. 
We become accustomed to such an order of sequences, 
and the repetition at length makes so vivid an im- 
pression that it becomes a settled "belief" that it is 
necessary and universal. But the philosopher who has 
investigated the grounds of this belief, plainly sees that 
it is wholly destitute of all validity. It is a mere per- 
suasion induced by habit only, and from the very sources 
of all knowledge in sensation this must be utterly excluded. 
Skej)ticism may here take up its position unmolested at 
the very basis of all reasoning from effect to cause, and 
in the very foundations of the Inductive Philosophy. It 
is not possible that we should know nature to have any 
laws in her successions; we can at the most have only 
persuasion and belief, and the philospher sees that this 
i 



USES OF RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 41 

is all induced solely by a mere repetition of a particular 
order of sequences. 

Precisely the same philosophizing in reference to sub- 
stances induces the skepticism of any permanency in the 
being, as above of any necessity in the order of events. 
The substance is as impossible to be given in sensation 
as is the cause. We have such qualities grouped together, 
and it may in the same way be explained that inasmuch 
as we have so often seen them together, we come at length 
to the conviction that they are necessarily together, and 
that there is some common permanent substance in which 
they inhere. The philosopher knows that there are only 
the qualities of redness, fragrance, softness, etc., together 
in the sensation, and that the substance which we call 
a rose is nothing but the grouping of the mere qualities 
in the sense. These qualities of matter and the exercises 
of mind, as given in perception, are perpetually arising 
and departing in the sense, and have no other ground 
of connection than " a divine constitution." The qualities 
appear, perpetuated in certain groups: and the exercises 
appear, prolonged through certain series; but sense can 
give no permanent substratum, and all knowledge that 
there is a permanent body, or a perduring mind, is alike 
impossible. 

The demonstration which we may gain from the 
psychology of the Sense goes, thus, but a little way in 
effectually overthrowing the skepticism of either Sensation- 
alism or Materialism, for while it proves that perception 
gives real phenomena, it leaves the whole question in doubt 
whether the mental exercises have any abiding source, or 
the material qualities any permanent substance. There may 



42 INTRODUCTION. 

be veritable organic sensations, but that can determine 
nothing about an outward world of material substances as 
object beyond phenomena. 

But a more incorrigible skepticism still results from this 
theory when comprehensively examined and intrepidly 
prosecuted to its legitimate conclusions. It is the testi- 
mony in the convictions of universal consciousness that 
we perceive immediately the external objects themselves. 
Every man is convinced that it is the outer object, and not 
some representative of it, which he perceives. The knowl- 
edge that the object is out of myself, and other than myself, 
and thus a reality not subjective merely, is the testimony of 
common sense every where. All minds, that of philoso- 
phers as well as common people, are shut up to the testi- 
mony of consciousness for a direct and immediate percep- 
tion of the outward object. The skeptic himself admits, 
yea, insists upon this, and founds upon it the necessary con- 
clusions of his skepticism, rendered the more invincible 
thereby from the contradiction which follows. 

For when the unexamined convections of consciousness, 
as direct for the immediate perception of an outer world, 
are brought to the test of philosophical investigation as 
above, the demonstration comes out full, sound, and clear, 
that all such immediate knowledge is impossible. The very 
sensation through which the knowledge is given is wholly 
mental, and at the most can be determined as only represen- 
tative of the object, and not that it is that object itself. It 
is not possible to affirm beyond the immecliateness of the 
organic sensation ; and all that can directly be known is, 
that the mind has such sensations, and this it may deem to 
be a perception of an outward object, but the reason attains 



USES OF RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 43 

the irrefragable conclusion that the sensation only, and not 
the object as external, can be immediately in the conscious- 
ness. A demonstration of reason, thus, concludes directly 
against the testimony of universal consciousness. And 
now, where are we as intelligent beings? Consciousness 
contradicts reason ; the reason belies consciousness. They 
are each independent sources of human knowledge ; unhes- 
itating conviction must follow a clear decision of either ; 
and yet here they openly and flatly contradict each other. 
The nature of man as intelligent, stands out a self-contra- 
diction. From the very light which is within us, we are 
made to conclude that light itself to be darkness, and thus 
all ground for knowledge in any way is self-annihilated. 
The truth of our intellectual nature is itself falsehood, and 
there remains nothing other than to doubt universally. 
This is the dreadful, but from the philosophy of representa- 
tion in sensation, the unavoidable conclusion of David 
Hume ; and here we come out to a necessary Universal 
Skepticism. 

Reid, more especially to counteract the last, but equally 
as defensive against all the above forms of skepticism, intro- 
duces here his theory based on the assumptions of common 
sense. Rejecting all notion of any representation in percep- 
tion, and imputing all such conclusions to the wandering 
and delusive speculations of philosophy, he takes the uni- 
versal decision of common consciousness on this subject to 
be true — that we immediately know the outer material 
world in the perceptions of sensation ; and forestalls all con- 
tradiction, by denying all validity to any speculations which 
attempt to reach back beyond such decisions of universal 
consciousness. Wiser than all philosophy ; higher than all 



44 INTRODUCTION. 

speculations of the reason ; further back than any demon- 
strations can be allowed as valid ; this decision of common 
sense is the first thing given, the ultimate truth in which all 
philosophy must begin, and on which all demonstration 
must be dependent, and which is never to be disputed. 
He thus saves himself from all skepticism as above, in any 
of its forms, by denying their fundamental assumption of a 
mediate perception, and assuming that the human intellect 
was so made as to know the outer world immediately. 

Here, then, are two counter-assumptions standing one 
over against the other, nor can one demolish or be demol- 
ished by the other. One assumes that sensation can be 
none other than a representative of the object in perception; 
the other assumes that sensation gives the outer object 
immediately; and here they both stand on their ultimate 
positions. Neither can attempt to go back of their 
assumed ultimate truths, neither will admit that the assump- 
tions of the other are clear in their own light and self- 
affirmed ; and thus neither may fortify his own position nor 
assail the opposite, and each can stand upon his own 
ground and defy all the logical and metaphysical artillery of 
his antagonist. 

And now, surely nothing can avail here, that only 
attempts to sharpen the senses, or exactly to apprehend 
appearances. These notions of substance and cause can 
never be made to appear. No possible functions of the 
sense can reach them. Unless we can transcend all knowl. 
edge from sensation, and attain to these notions as wholly 
new conceptions in reflection, and verify them in the higher 
functions of an understanding as having a valid reality of 
being, we can not exclude the skeptic from his logical right 



USES OF EATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 45 

to doubt whether permanent mind or matter exists, or 
whether even he must not doubt universally. This, then, is 
a further use to which we may, perhaps, in the end find the 
results of Rational Psychology to be subservient. If we 
can come to the knowledge of the understanding in its con- 
ditioning laws of operation, and determine to the intellect, 
in its process of thinking in judgments, an equal validity as 
before in its process of perception ; then may we from such 
results demonstrate also the validity of their being for the 
substances and causes of the understanding, as before for 
the phenomena of the sense. And such verification of the 
being of substances and causes, and their uniformity as uni- 
versal laws in the connections of nature, will be an annihila- 
tion of all skepticism of mind or matter, and do away with 
all apparent conflict between consciousness and reason. And 
most surely such a consummation is hopeless, in any other 
manner than through an a priori method of investigation. 

III. A more serious difficulty than any which Ave have yet 
encountered remains still behind, and needs to be obviated. 
The following order of thought will bring this difficulty to 
light, and disclose the use which may be made of the results 
in Rational Psychology for its removal. 

In the circumscription of all knowledge to that which is 
given in sensation and the modifications which may be made 
thereof in reflection, the necessary and universal connections 
of cause and effect are left to rest wholly upon assumption. 
Hume is manifestly consistent with the fundamental princi- 
ple of the philosophy of sensation, in denying to human 
knowledge any thing in cause and effect beyond simple 
antecedent and consequent. No science can be based upon 
the universal laws of nature, for it is impossible from this 



46 INTRODUCTION. 

philosophy to go any further than probability when it is 
assumed that nature has any universal laws. Hume recog- 
nizes the fact that the human mind does, in some way, 
attain the conviction that the events in nature have a neces- 
sary connection, and that the order of this connection is 
uniform and invariable. This conviction is fir from knowl- 
edge, and is at bottom only credulity, growing out of the 
frequent repetition of the sequences in our experience, and 
therefore a belief from habit merely ; yet does it become 
complete and controlling, and impossible to be counteracted 
by any thing but the most irrefragable demonstration. 

Hume's argument against the possibility of proof for a 
miracle as an interruption of the order of nature, the neces- 
sary connection of which has such complete conviction in 
the human mind, is really unanswerable upon any empirical 
grounds. There must ever be a stronger conviction against 
the miracle than there can be persuasion for it. The sup- 
posed interposition of a God out of nature, who for good 
reasons interrupts the order of nature, is wholly gratuitous 
on the ground of this philosophy, inasmuch as all argumen- 
tation from the connections of cause and effect must be 
wholly inadequate to conclude upon the existence of such a 
being. The conviction that a God is, can at the most rise 
no higher, and be deduced from nothing other than the 
conviction that nature is uniform in her sequences ; and 
then, to assume a Deity whose existence might make a mir- 
acle possible can surely have little weight with the philoso- 
pher, who very distinctly sees that both the Deity and the 
miracle must rest upon contradictory data; the existence 
of the Deity upon an argument from the invariable and 
unbroken order of causation, and the miracle itself a fact 



USES OF RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 47 

which is a direct subversion of this invariable order. Such 
skepticism in reference to all pretences that miracles have 
been wrought is utterly incorrigible, except through some 
other discipline than that which may be adniinistered by 
any empirical philosophy. The skepticism is legitimate 
from the premises ; the sophistry has been on the side of 
such as have kept the philosophy and yet attempted to 
answer the skeptic. 

But this skepticism in regard to miracles, and to the 
being of a God who might work miracles, sustained by 
the controlling conviction that the order of nature is 
uniform, and yet the conviction so controlling demon- 
strably only a credulous illusion, becomes a demonstrated 
pantheism or a demonstrated atheism, in several processes 
of argumentation from the partial premises of different 
philosophies. The philosophy of sensation has ever tended 
directly on towards universal materialism, and ultimately 
through fatalism to blank atheism. With Locke, there was 
the distinct and clear admission, that while sensation was 
passive in the reception of objects from without, yet was 
there an active principle for reflection within ; and that 
these active faculties constructed a multitude of complex 
and abstract ideas out of the materials furnished by the 
senses. And yet, inasmuch as reflection could have nothing 
to do beyond merely elaborating that which was given in 
the senses, it must necessarily have confined its whole work 
to that which was wholly within the real forms of space 
and time. Its tendency to Materialism and Fatalism may 
be correctly traced in England through Hartley, Priestley, 
Darwin, and others. But in France, the more marked issue 
appears. Condillac so modified reflection as to make it the 



48 INTRODUCTION". 

mere self-consciousness of the feeling given in sensation ; 
and then shows that every faculty — attention, memory, 
comparison, judgment, and even the will and all our 
emotions — may be accounted for as modified and " trans- 
formed sensations." The passage from this was easy and 
sure to a complete material mechanism in all the phenomena 
of our inner being, until it attained its compound of Materi- 
alism, Fatalism, and Atheism in the conclusions of d'Hol- 
bach, D'Alembert, and the French Encyclopedia, where 
man appears as only a combination of material organiza- 
tions ; his intellectual being the mere development of neces- 
sitated sensations ; his morality the impulse of self-gratifi- 
cation ; his immortality going out in the dissolution of his 
bodily organism ; and his God the mere personification of 
nature in her blind operations, which a diseased fancy and a 
superstitious fear had elevated to universal dominion. 

On the other hand, the philosophy of rationalism has 
tended towards absolute Idealism, and ultimately to Ideal 
Pantheism in the opposite direction. With Kant, in his 
speculative philosophy, there is reality given in sensation, 
and here is truly all the material of knowledge ; but this 
can come into our cognition in no other manner than 
according to the formal conditions of our subjective being. 
All, therefore, that we can know is the phenomenal only, 
and as these phenomena are connected and generalized into 
a Soul, a Universe, and a Deity, they are but the modifica- 
tions of the material given in sense reflected through the 
regulative forms of the subjective understanding and the 
reason. We can not demonstrate that there is any objec- 
tive being as the correlative of our formal thought, nor can 
we demonstrate that there is not such objective valid 



USES OF EATIOUL PSYCHOLOGY. 49 

reality. Ontology, in reference to the Soul, Nature, and 
God, must be left to opinion and faith, and can never 
become science. Phenomena are, as valid realities ; but 
what they are in themselves, and only as our formal facul- 
ties represent them in our own subjective apprehension, no 
philosophy can possibly determine. 

The way was thus open for Fichte to deny the reality 
which had been assumed here for the phenomenal, and to 
show that the phenomenal was as truly a reflection in the 
laws of our subjective being, as in Kant's philosophy had 
been proved for the Soul, Nature, and the Deity. Thus, 
instead of admitting with Kant, the being of our- formal 
subjective intellect and the reality of the objective phenom- 
enal matter, Fichte contends that the last is mere opinion 
and can not be demonstrated science, and that thus only 
our formal subjective being is that with which we must 
begin, and on which all philosophy must rest. And now, 
by the mere process of thought, the way is to be shown 
from this subjective being alone, out to all our ideas of the 
universal and the absolute. The subjective, as self or Ego, 
by thinking, attains to that which limits itself by the laws 
of its own being, and wholly prevents the action from going 
out uninterruptedly and losing itself in the infinite ; and 
such necessary limitations in our activity we take cognizance 
of, objectify in our consciousness, and deem them to be the 
phenomena of an outer world. Another step is then 
taken, by recalling our activity from these limitations in 
our thinking which we have made to be outward phenom- 
ena, and thus in reflection we come to apprehend our own 
activity and attain the contents of 'our consciousness, and 
here determine that the mind itself is the whole sphere of 

3 



50 INTRODUCTION. 

its operations, and that its activity can do no more than to 
objectify its own limitation in its own laws, and then come 
back and find itself as the subject of its own acts and the 
object of its own consciousness. All possible theoretic 
or speculative knowledge is thus wholly subjective, and 
embraced within the sphere of the Ego only. 

Schelling transcends the subject and the object in 
Fichte's philosophy, and assumes an absolute Ego as the pri- 
mal self-existent being. Out of this, by one act of a di- 
remptive or disparting movement, both the subject and 
object are simultaneously given. This absolute being is 
quite back of all that can appear in consciousness, and can 
be known only in a purely "intellectual intuition," but 
which in a determined logical movement develops itself into 
the unconscious world of nature ; the conscious world of 
mind ; and finally, to the knowledge that all of nature and 
humanity are but the products of this logical movement, 
and which self-knowledge of the all-embracing movement 
gives the developed Deity. 

As the aeorn has within it potentially the mature oak, or 
as the egg is potentially the complete fowl, so it may be 
illustrated has Schelling's absolute being potentially within 
it the world of nature, of humanity, and of a self-conscious, 
all-embracing Deity. The living force in the acorn, or the 
egg, is not the oak or the fowl, but it may be contemplated 
as passing out in a determined developing movement, and 
when in utter unconsciousness, the successive statements in 
the process are the growth of nature ; so far as it may be 
conceived that it has come to feel its own movement, it has 
the sentient life of the animal ; and when this self-feeling has 
come through reflection to a discriminating self-conscious- 



USES OF EATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 51 

ness, the development has reached to the stating of human- 
ity. "When this further comes to know itself as the all- 
embracing source of nature and humanity, and that it iden- 
tifies in itself all of the objective and subjective being in the 
universe, the true Godhead is evolved and the realized 
Deity is therein attained. 

But even this identification of the subjective and the 
objective in the absolute is still so far thoroughly -objective, 
in that the developing process is contemplated as taking 
place before us ; we are looking on this living movement, 
and the whole result in nature, humanity, and evolved deity 
stands out face to face with us ; and thus with both Fichte 
and Schelling there is an unresolved dualism. The Ego 
develops itself before a spectator who is wholly outside of 
the process and altogether inexplicable by the philosophy. 
Whence comes, and where goes, and who is this observer 
that looks on both subject and object and the living process 
evolving them ? 

Here Hegel interposes his method and we have a modifi- 
cation of the critical philosophy which completely exhausts 
all analysis and abstraction and consummates its entire mis- 
sion. This living process is taken as a thinking movement 
and assumed to be a pure logical act exclusive of aoy sub- 
sisting actor, and then instead of standing outside and look- 
ing on, we are made to stand in and identify ourselves with 
the movement. There is no outside spectator, but solely an 
inner witness ; and this inner eye does not look forward and 
forecast, but solely opens in consciousness to the present 
position. What is successively given is retained, and the 
last is so combined or " suppressed" in the former, that the 
successive statements are posited in perpetually riper and 



52 INT PRODUCTION. 

maturer being as the development progresses. This whole 
dialectical process is most profoundly and elaborately expo- 
sed, and the World, Man, and God are successively given to 
recognition as the seeing eye opens upon the different stages 
of the logical movement. 

But when we make this philosophy to awake from its 
dream of development, and ascertain its results, it must per- 
force find that it has ensphered all things in a transcen- 
dental pantheism. Thinking and being are the same. The 
process of creating is the order of logical thought. Every 
object is an ideal product, and nature and humanity are 
but the development of the one living process of think- 
ing, the aggregate and consummation of which becomes 
the completed Deity. 

A philosophy exclusively based upon either the objective 
or the subjective is necessarily partial in its very beginning, 
and must eventuate when carried to its legitimate issue, in 
one-sided and therefore erroneous conclusions. The philo- 
sophical speculation on either side must follow some law of 
order, and if it be the law impressed upon the objective in 
its development of cause and effect, it must ultimately 
absorb all things within the workings of a mechanical neces- 
sity ; and iftit be the law which directs the subjective devel- 
opment of thought, it must in the end involve all things 
within the rigid conclusions of a logical fatality. A com- 
prehensive survey of both, readily determines what must be 
the landing place of each. 

Let the objective be the starting point, and the observed 
facts in their law of experience must give direction to all 
investigation. In following out such investigations, physi- 
cal science will be greatly promoted ; the laws of cause and 



USES OF RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 53' 

effect in astronomy, chemistry, physiology, geology, etc., 
will be followed out to their furthest traces in human obser- 
vation ; and practical utility and social expediency will be 
the ground-springs of human action. But such a philoso- 
phy has at length only to open the eyes and look around 
from its position to determine its own interests, and it must 
find itself fast bound within the chain of a fixed causation, 
and shut up within the prison of nature hopeless of all 
deliverance. Without some salient point in nature, from 
which, saltu mortali, we may fairly project our philosophy 
beyond nature, then must our whole being perforce content 
itself to abide within nature, and take the destiny of nature ; 
and the man must recognize himself and all that is about 
him, as separate links in the same indefinite chain of coming 
and departing events, each in its destined place fulfilling its 
own mission, and all constituting a progressive series of 
necessitated successions which is both unalterable and inter- 
minable. We can know nothing beyond nature, we must 
conclude that there is nothing beyond nature to be known. 
The positivism of Auguste Comte is the natural and neces- 
sary result. 

And here, let it be most gravely inquired, if there be not 
some long-standing and far-famed theories in metaphysics 
among us, which must infallibly terminate in the above con- 
clusions, whenever they shall be resolutely pushed onward 
to their consequences. A philosophy which includes in the 
same category of causation the changes in matter and the 
originations in mind, though it may use the qualifying terms 
of a natural and moral necessity, but which still do not. 
mark any discrimination in the connections but only in the 
things connected, must, unavoidably find itself within the 



54 INTRODUCTION. 

charmed circle out of which there can be no escaping. It is 
not possible that such a theory can vindicate for the human 
soul in its immortality, nor for the Deity in his eternity, the 
possession of any attributes which may rise above, or reach 
beyond, the interminable conditions in the linked series of a 
fixed causation. An assumed God of nature must be but 
nature still, evermore stretching the chain onward. 

Let, on the other hand, the subjective be the starting- 
point, and the logical order of thinking in judgments must 
be the law for our whole process of philosophizing. And 
here, doubtless, great progress will be made in intellectual 
science ; and the most abstract thoughts, and fine-spun dis- 
tinctions, and broadest generalizations, and most subtle 
analyses, will be distinctly seized by the human understand- 
ing, and carried out to the most profound demonstrations. 
But such a philosophy, again, has only to lift its eyes from 
its minute and critical examination of the goings-on of sub- 
jective thought within, and look out upon the bearings of 
its course, and it must find itself plunging into an abyss of 
abstractions empty, and bottomless ; from which there is no 
escape until itself, the soul, nature, and God are all lost 
together in an Idealism which ultimately vanishes in mhility. 
So long as anything remains, the laws of thought must be 
there, and they are as rigid in their consecutive develop- 
ments as the fixed ongoings in the successions of nature, 
and must bind the soul and the Deity within the same logical 
necessities. But even these exist only from sufferance, and 
must be as truly ideal as the thoughts induced by them ; 
, and thus both law and logical process of thought, together 
with all of nature and the absolute to which they had 



USES OF RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 55 

attained, await only that sweeping abstraction which abol- 
ishes the whole ideal vision forever. 

There are two other methods taken in dealing with this 
question of finding an Absolute Deity, neither of which can 
bring any relief against speculative skepticism, and yet both 
are frequently used with much confidence ; these are Eclec- 
ticism and Mysticism. 

Eclecticism anticipates that there will be found truth 
more or less in all methods of philosophizing, though often- 
times partial, obscured, and distorted, and it essays to sift 
this truth from the error, and with this pure residuum of all 
systems build up the only and altogether true. And now, 
undoubtedly it may so far be yielded to such a theory as to 
admit that few philosophical systems can be wholly wrong ; 
that truth from any one must be consistent with the truths 
of all others ; and that the only and altogether true system 
of j)hilosophy must be competent to find a place within its 
comprehension for all philosophical truth ; and also, that if 
all the truths of all philosophical systems were discriminated 
from the errors of all, and this in combination with all other 
truth was harmoniously bound up in one system, it would 
be a true comprehensive philosophy. 

But how shall we go on with this sifting process, and 
detect all pure truth and take it out from all other systems ? 
Certainly this can in no other manner be done than in first 
having already some system of our own and taking our stand 
upon it, and applying its law of construction to comprehend 
all that is true in all others, and thereby vindicate its own 
right to be and to take that which demolishes others in 
building up itself. It can not be allowed that the true sys- 
tem shall be some arbitrary patch-work by selecting and 



56 INTRODUCTION. 

appropriating assumed truths here and there, but it must 
have its own law of construction which can of right claim 
all truth, because it can put all in its own place and legiti- 
mate its possession by a universal and harmonious colliga- 
tion. Eclecticism can not thus begin its work of taking 
truths from other systems, except by already possessing and 
bringing with it its own comprehensive law to vindicate its 
title to what it takes, and not by arrogantly plundering 
what it may covet. 

This is the professed theory of Cousin, and he holds 
that in all correlative objects, the knowing of one gives in 
that the knowledge of the other. The knowledge of the 
finite and of the relative gives at once the knowledge of the 
infinite and the absolute. To know finite causes is there- 
fore at the same time to know an infinite cause, and to 
know relative causes is thereby to know an absolute cause ; 
and the knowledge of the relative and the absolute cause, 
gives also, at the same time, the knowledge of the differ- 
ence between them. He thus conditions all things upon an 
absolute cause, and affirms that as cause it must of necessity 
go out into effect, though he assumes that the absolute 
cause is not all exhausted in the effect. The universe, it is 
affirmed, is as necessary to the Deity as the Deity is to the 
universe. The assumed absolute cause is made at once a 
conditioned cause, and as truly necessitated to nature as the 
cause is to its effect in nature. An inevitable pantheism is 
also involved, for nature is but the absolute produced for- 
ward into its effect, and if it does not exhaust the absolute, 
it is yet so far forth a portion of the absolute cause pro- 
duced onward into nature as effect. It is, therefore, aside 
from its unphilosophic assumption of the knowledge of the 



USES OF RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 57 

absolute in the relative merely because the absolute is 
suggested by the relative, still as truly fatalistic and pan- 
theistic as any system which it has been assumed to sup- 
plant. 

Mysticism wholly despairs of any help in reaching to 
the supernatural and finding the being and attributes of 
God by any intellectual process. Suppressing all specula- 
tion, the Mystic relies wholly on internal impulses and mys- 
terious impressions. From the inner prompting of his own 
immortal spirit, he verily believes that there is living and 
conscious being within the dark region of the supernatural, 
but he distrusts all proffered help from philosophy and 
leaves the intellect to work out its problems in physics, and 
weave its syllogisms in dialectics, and vainly to exercise 
itself in the endless speculations of metaphysics. He may 
study nature in the facts of experience, but he will not 
think nor reason any further. He turns to some inward 
illumination, and confides in some suddenly imparted senti- 
ment or impulsive feeling which will convey to him an 
immediate knowledge of the mysterious spirit-world. This 
may take on very varied forms of working. It may be the 
philosophical mysticism of Jacobi, where all is made to rest 
upon an ultimate and absolute feeling of belief, and in 
which this ultimate faith-principle is taken up and its work- 
ings attempted rationally to be accounted for, and all its 
results subjected to an exceedingly elegant, ingenious, and 
extended analysis : or it may be the enthusiastic impulses of 
Peter the Hermit : or the fanatic persistence of Ignatius 
Loyola ; or the credulous revealings of Fox's inner light ; 
or the profound rhapsodies of Jacob Boehme. The imme- 
diate organ of knowledge in all is an inner and inexplicable 

3* 



58 INTEODUOTION. 

feeling of faith, with which the intellect can have little com- 
munion, and whose process of revealing is as mysterious as 
the beings it reveals. 

Without questioning how and whence the revelation is 
to come, or at all testing by the judgment the inspiration 
when given, the man turns himself reverently toward the 
dark unknown, and in silent contemplation waits with con- 
fiding expectation for the message to be delivered or the 
vision to appear. The excited workings of his own spirit 
transfer their products to this dim region of the supernatu- 
ral and his inner sympathies and imaginings become to him 
objective realities, and the spirit-land is made to be the 
scene of such ghostly communings as abound in the credu- 
lous experiences of Emmanuel Swedenborg. ISTor are all 
these illusions wholly empty chimeras. They have their 
actual being in the inner life and spirit of the man himself, 
and come as a reflection from that which has been a true 
possession in the immortal soul. As possessing any objec- 
tive significance and value they are wholly meaningless and 
worthless, but subjectively read and interpreted, they con- 
tain a very important lesson for philosophy to study and 
expound. But while there may be reflections and indices 
of much that is true in our subjective feeling and experi- 
ence, yet can we never rely upon this inner working as any 
inspiration or revelation from the supernatural world. 
They have their whole origin and characteristic from the 
interior life of the deluded man, and are to be interpreted 
as wholly that which comes from him and not any thing 
that comes to him. A divine message through some form 
of supernatural inspiration will never leave its vindication to 
mere credulity, but will always have such a stamp and seal 



USES OF RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 59 

upon it as must carry to the reason the full conviction of 
Heaven's authority. 

There may also be noticed that which has become an 
English form of German Trancendentalism, and which 
has its modifications in the writings of distinguished names 
both in Great Britain and America. Without going pro- 
foundly into the speculations of the leading German think- 
ers or adopting their method, and indeed rejecting their 
complete subjective idealism, there Is a retaining of the 
entire theory of a development from some supposed and 
assumed absolute source, and that this development is 
through an interminable process according to an internal 
and determined law of movement. Nature is not a medley 
of shifting phenomena, but an orderly unfolding of events 
according to an inner and fixed law of progress. Rising 
above the philosophy of sensation, and clearly aware of the 
empty and dead mechanism in which that philosophy must 
terminate, it admits of living forces and laws in nature, and 
strenuously contends for the authority and validity of philo- 
sophical investigations and demonstrations in reference to 
this orderly aod progressive development. Nature is no 
longer viewed merely in the husk and dead shell of the phe- 
nomenal, but living powers are apprehended as working 
beneath and ever unfolding new forms of beauty, and perpet- 
ually progressing in its perfectibility. The laws of thought 
and intelligence have their counterpart in the laws of nature 
and humanity, and the world of matter and of mind move 
on correlatively in parallel lines, with even step, and never- 
ending progression. In all this science finds order, har- 
mony, truth, and beauty. Life and gladness abound; and 
where disorder appears, it is only the result of a higher 



60 INTRODUCTION. 

order, for all its evils and distress teach lessons of wisdom 
or touch sensibilities and sympathies whose gushing emo- 
tions we could not afford to have missed. Nothing on the 
whole can be wrong ; the progressive march of nature and 
humanity is as straight and rapid as possible. But here is 
the terminus of all thought and philosophy. The living 
force and work in nature, the determined progress of 
humanity in taste, and social refinement, and political order, 
and philosophical truth ; these give themes of never-failing 
interest ; but all beyond, the supernatural world, the being 
of a personal God and His moral government, the future 
immortality revealed and the divine plan of preparing sinful 
men for it, and His purposes of penal retribution in it ; these 
are gratuitous assumptions, unphilosophical and indemon" 
strable. Science can attain to nothing beyond the corrella- 
tive laws in nature and humanity, and any absolute person- 
ality must be inconceivable and impossible, and thus all 
inspiration and miraculous intervention is incredible. Inspi- 
ration can only be a fuller impartation to some favored sage 
of the universal reason, and who thus becomes the Seer and 
Prophet of his age, and whose oracles may live in the 
religious veneration of posterity until the rising reason in 
the race has transcended their import, when humanity again 
needs its new Prophet and may expect in the order of prog- 
ress its new revelations. 

This Transcendentalism is only partial, and its stand- 
point is wholly within nature. It transcends the phenom- 
enal of the sense fairly and philosophically, and such is its 
deservedly great praise. But to it the supernatural is utter 
darkness. Not the mere absence of light but the absence 
of all being; the darkness of entire negation. For it nature 



USES OF RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 61 

and humanity run on their perpetual correspondencies, and 
if there he aught which they do not fill it must be an utter 
void. It is for its adherents the part of wisdom to suppress 
the aspirations of the free and immortal within them, for 
this can be only the workings of a delusive hope or an 
instinctive fear, and the sure precursor of superstition or 
fanaticism. The reason as an organ for knowing the super- 
natural is discarded, and yet the philosopher calls himself a 
Rationalist! He shuts himself hopelessly within nature 
and humanity, and yet calls himself a Transcendentalist ! 
He has so far transcended the mere phenomenal that he can 
give unity to nature and correspondence between nature 
and humanity, but he recognizes no function for transcend- 
ing nature and comprehending both nature and humanity in 
a personal Deity. Humanity to him is in and of nature, 
and all the correspondencies between humanity and nature 
are in the necessary logical connections of the former and 
the physical connections of cause and effect in the latter. 
There is to him no free power of origination and self-direc- 
tion any where. Humanity is on its parallel progress with 
nature, each with its destined order of development and 
fixed laws of movement. The world without is truly the 
counterpart of the intellectual world within, and here the 
philosopher is perpetually finding analogies, correlatives, 
and correspondencies, and delighting himself with the won- 
derful traces of harmony and beauty between them. But 
that which is truly free, personal, and immortal in the spirit, 
this philosophy wholly ignores, and between this and nature 
there is often the imperative for contrast and conflict. The 
necessities of the natural and the responsibilities of the 
spiritual can not be held as analogous without perpetual 



62 INTRODUCTION. 

absurdities and contradictions. The self-conscious and self- 
active can not be made to run parallel with the caused and 
necessitated, without introducing shocking deformities and 
painful discords. 

And precisely in this is the ready explanation of what 
so perpetually appears in all the writings of this modern 
transcendental school. In its partiality and incompleteness, 
it must often give unequal representations ; the correlation 
in the intellectual subjective and the physical objective will 
give truth, the contrast in the free and spiritual subjective 
and the material objective must give absurdity. Hence we 
have at one time, so much life, vigor, clearness and depth 
of originality, that we stand admiring and delighted; at 
another time, the whole is equivocal, ambiguous, and so 
obscurely enigmatical, that one man deems it the veracious 
though mysterious responses of an oracle, and another the 
ravings of a lunatic ; again, we have comparisons so gro- 
tesque and ludicrous, that we can not choose but smile ; and 
then, so profane and irreverent a blending of the natural 
and the spiritual, the human and the divine, that we ought 
indignantly to frown. The human, which it can know, is so 
often represented in the phraseology of the divine, which it 
assumes not to know, that the whole speech becomes utterly 
impertinent, and often shockingly blasphemous. The posi- 
tion is wholly within nature, and it is denied that there may 
be any projection of the intellect beyond nature, and thus 
if any thing be said of the supernatural it must refer to the 
laws of the natural, and if any attributes of Divinity are 
mentioned they must apply to some of the aggregates of 
humanity. And hence, that mixture of the meaning and 
the meaningless, the expressed and the inexpressible, which 



USES OF RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 63 

so abounds through the speculations and teachings of this 
philosophy. Here and there gleams of light so bright and 
pure break out from masses of mist and clouds, as to seem 
almost like flashes of inspiration ; and then come forced 
analogies so strange and wild, as to seem rather the ravings 
of madness. 

But with all the interest which this philosophy would 
seek to inspire for the inner life of nature, and the faith it 
would cherish for the progress of humanity, it still termin- 
ates wholly within the conditions of those laws, which bind 
the thinking in logical sequences and outward events in 
necessitated successions. The Universe, the Soul, and the 
Deity, are all circumscribed within the iron chain of a fixed 
order of progress. The chain, though endless, is yet one. 
From the first, if any first can be, no link is independent of 
the others, but one exists for all and all for each, and all 
proper personality is impossible. The Deity is the inner 
force and law, which is operating as logical thought in 
humanity and as causation in physical nature ; and by an 
intestine necessity works out the perpetual development, 
orderly, incessantly, irresistibly ; yet wholly destitute alike 
of feeling, of foresight, and of freedom. Hence those 
glowing and sometimes truly sublime representations of the 
deep, mysterious, silent, and eternal working of this power 
within and around us. All things working on, and together 
working out their own destiny; and the changeless law 
pervading the whole is the God of the whole, and there is 
no God beyond and above this. 

And now, verily, it can but little subserve the good 
cause, to meet this highest form of Infidelity with ridicule, 
hard names, and reproachful epithets. The system is the 



64 INTRODUCTION. 

product of severe and earnest thought, and has much of 
pure and high truth embraced within it. It will never 
permit itself to be laughed out of countenance, nor can it 
be beaten down by denunciation. Nature has fixed con- 
nections and established laws, and her inner causality is 
working out for herself an orderly and progressive develop- 
ment. It is a great attainment for any philosophy to have 
followed up the road of truth and science thus far, and to 
have settled the laws of nature's development upon the 
basis of a rational demonstration. It is the only way in 
which the errors originating in the limited philosophy of 
sensation can be met and redressed. But, while it is to its 
credit, that it goes thus far, yet it is itself but an incom- 
plete and partial philosophy, and terminates in greater 
difficulties and deeper errors than those which it has 
removed. The evil is not in what this system embraces, 
but from what it excludes. What we need is a hardy and 
complete philosophy which will not stop within nature's 
Temple and worship only amid the products of her agency 
and under the authority of her laws and principles. We 
need from within nature, whence our knowledge must 
begin, some point for firm footing so high that we may 
overlook, and truly cast our vision beyond nature, and find 
an absolute and free Being who has given existence to, and 
who controls nature. The mind must be disciplined and 
the intellectual vision purified and exercised until it may 
clearly discern a sharp outline, discriminating liberty in 
personality from physical causation not only, but from 
instinctive impulses, and constitutional inclinations, and 
undirected spontaneity, and unhindered agency in one 
direction. A personality must be found, with a capability 



USES OF RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 65 

to originate objective and substantial being from within 
himself; and to put forth his creations as other than, and 
quite distinct from, his own being; and who both in exist- 
ence and agency shall be wholly unconditioned by any 
higher causation; and whose line of operation shall be 
determined by nothing from within his work, but wholly 
from an imperative out of and independent of his work, 
and given altogether in his own absolute being. This is 
essential to the idea of a personal, underived, and inde- 
pendent Deity ; and except as we cognize the actual exist- 
ence of such an absolute person, we can possibly worship 
none other than an " unknown God." 

It is not sufficient that we leap to the conclusion, as is 
mostly done in all our popular treatises on Natural Theol- 
ogy, and thus attain only the assumption of the existence of 
such a Being — because such will very well relieve the want 
which we feel in our speculations to find a permanent rest- 
ing place to our regressus in the tracing up of the series of 
conditioned effects from conditioning causes, and whence 
also we may begin to trace down the flowing stream of 
events as independent of any higher source — inasmuch as in 
this manner we can possibly attain to no higher than an 
hypothetical Deity. Our want is satisfied by such an hypo- 
thesis, and the being of nature is explained by such a suppo- 
sition ; but that there is actually such a God, is in this way, 
wholly supposititious and indemonstrable. The true idea of 
a God is first to be attained, viz., a being who may originate 
universal nature from himself, and not be himself a compo- 
nent or an included element, but who, though originating 
nature, in his personality still stands forth beyond and inde- 
pendent of it, and at his pleasure operates upon and within 



6Q INTRODUCTION. 

it ; and then this idea realized in this, that having in an a 
priori demonstration determined how it is possible thus to 
comprehend nature, we should look at nature and find there 
the correlative and thus the demonstrative of this idea in act- 
ual existence. The Being whom we seek to know is tran- 
scendental in the highest degree. He transcends all appear- 
ance in sensation, inasmuch as He can never be made a 
content of the sense and constructed into an object in con- 
sciousness. He also transcends all the notions in substance 
and cause in the understanding, inasmuch as while they 
only connect qualities and events in nature, he himself 
is the author of those substances and causes, and thus 
comprehends in his own being the very substance in its 
causality of all the pheomena of nature, and is thus wholly 
out of and beyond all the things given in the judgments of 
our understanding. The only faculty competent to reach 
and know the objective existence of such a Being must rise 
higher than merely to construct within limits in space and 
time, as does the intellect in sense ; and higher than merely 
to connect such constructions in a nature of things, as does 
the intellect in the understanding ; even that which can 
comprehend nature itself in an origination from liberty, and 
a consummation in the final ends of a free and absolute Per- 
sonality ; and which can possibly belong only to the func- 
tions of the reason. God is not phenomenon, nor substance 
and cause connecting phenomena : He is beyond all this, for 
this is nature only and is God's creature. He thus as truly 
transcends the understanding as He does the sense, and can 
not possibly become objectively known by any logical pro- 
cess but by the higher faculty of the reason. All philoso- 
phy is most absurdly denominated Rationalism, which 



USES OF RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 67 

makes its ultimate conclusions to be in nature, and denies 
that there is any thing which may be known as the super, 
natural. It is a Rationalism discarding the very organ and 
faculty of reason itself. 

And here it becomes highly important to note, that some 
of the strongest entrenchments of skepticism both in philos- 
ophy and religion — some of the most elaborate defences of 
all Infidelity — are now in process of erection upon this high 
ground. Whether named Liberalism, Neologism, Rational- 
ism, or Transcendentalism ; its foundation is here, and the 
superstructure is going up on this basis. And true philoso- 
phy has not accomplished her work and fulfilled the end of 
her mission, until she has utterly and forever demolished 
this entire foundation. It were a reproach to philosophy 
and theology to delay the final conquest of all this region, 
which from the days of Moses by the gift of divine author- 
ity, and from the days of Plato by the right of original dis- 
covery, has been the domain of truth, religion, and science ; 
and which only by a lawless usurpation has seemed to have 
passed into the hands of aliens. Every mind which has 
worked its way up to these heights of human thought, well 
knows that in this pure region there is a broad and fair 
inheritance for philosophy, and which it is incumbent on 
her to explore, to possess, and to cultivate. If some 
who have been there, growing giddy from the height 
or dazzled by excess of the brightness, have taken wrong 
positions and run false lines, their errors are surely not 
to be redressed by ridicule nor railing from those who stand 
below, but effectually in nothing short of girding up the 
loins, and ascending to the same heights, and making so 
accurate a survey as shall give the right to subvert their 



68 INTRODUCTION. 

false positions and abolish their wrong landmarks. Er- 
ror any where, when brought within the grasp of truth, is 
easily crushed, but never can the hand of truth be laid upon 
those errors in high places, except as some shall go up in 
her name, and take a final stand upon this last and 
highest point where science and skepticism may grapple in 
conflict. 

And certainly, the only possible method of finding such 
a position is from the final results of a Rational Psychology, 
which having given the laws of intelligence in the functions 
of the sense and the understaning, now completes its work 
in the attainment of the conditional laws of the faculty of 
the reason ; and by knowing the reason in its law, may thus 
lay the foundation for demonstrating the valid being of the 
Soul in its liberty, and of God in His absolute Personality, 
which can possibly be objects for the faculty of the reason 
alone. A true and comprehensive Rational Psychology is a 
necessary preliminary to all demonstrations in Ontology, 
and the subversion of skepticism by giving a position which 
commands the whole ground of its fundamental assump- 
tions. 

From all the foregoing considerations it is now manifest 
that Rational Psychology may subserve the purposes of 
science in three distinct departments, by affording a position 
from which skepticism in relation to the valid being of the 
objects given in each, may be met and counteracted. We 
have thus three distinct fields for our investigation, and in 
each of which lie some of the most important questions 
fundamental for all science. We need to determine the 
conditioning principles of perception in sensation ; as the 
basis of an argument for demonstrating, that the objects 



USES OF RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 69 

given in the sense as single qualities and exercises are real 
appearances. We need, moreover, to determine the condi- 
tioning principles of aR judgments in the understanding ; as 
the ground for demonstrating that the real phenomena 
given in sense are connected in substances and causes and 
thus become a nature of things, and which is also a valid 
reality. And then, lastly, we need to determine the condi- 
tioning principles of all comprehension of a nature of 
things in the faculty of the reason ; as the ground for a 
demonstration that the Soul in its liberty, and that the 
Deity in His personality, are valid existences. The Psy- 
chology terminates in the science of the faculties of the 
sense, the understanding, and the reason ; and when this is 
made the basis of a further demonstration for the valid 
being of the objects thus given, the science becomes Ontol- 
ogy- 

In this may be seen an outline of the work which is here 
proposed to be accomplished. The course lies in the direc- 
tion toward the highest attainments of thought to which 
the human mind may elevate itself. So far forth as our 
positions shall be taken in those a priori demonstrations 
which are given in the necessary and universal laws of intel- 
ligence, we may compel the convictions of even skepticism 
itself, and settle the rights and substantiate the claims of 
science to all her possessions. This is not the place to 
affirm the competency to put these topics in the clear light 
of an a priori demonstration ; but we are about to make 
the attempt, in all humility and with some sense of the mag- 
nitude and difficulty of the task, to explore how far we may 
find ground, and how firm it may be, for putting up our 



*I0 INTRODUCTION. 

intellectual buildings, and securing a completed structure of 
human science. Is the human mind shut up to faith on all 
subjects ? or are there some paths which lead to science f 
So far as the present attempt can avail, the sequel must 
determine to which alternative wo are left. 



RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 



GENERAL METHOD. 

Conviction from testimony is Faith ; experience in con- 
sciousness is Knowledge ; and the facts in experience car- 
ried back to a law which binds them together in systematic 
nnity is Science. When this law is found by bringing 
many conspiring facts together, and assumed to be univer- 
sal because it expounds and combines them so far as 
applied, it is inductive or empirical science. When the law 
is determined from a necessary principle, and thus in the 
principle it is beforehand seen what the law and therein also 
what the facts must be, it is ti % anscendental or rational 
science. The last only is the science now contemplated, and 
the following process is conditional for its validity as the 
true science of realities. 

The principle must be an ultimate truth, which in the 
insight of the reason is given as having in itself necessity 
and universality, and which consequently is not conditioned 
by power but must itself condition all power. It is thus no 
fact, or thing made, but an eternal truth which in the rea- 
son determines how things must be made. Thus, no three 
points can be made, which must not be in one plane ; and 



72 RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 

no cone can be made, which must not with its diameter on 
all sides through its base and surface be a right-angled 
triangle. With such principle as an ultimate truth in pos- 
session, it must further be competent to carry its determina- 
tions all through the process that is to be passed in the 
making, and thus beforehand see how the principle is a 
perfect scheme for the fact. As in the cone, it is competent 
to see that a right-angled triangle revolving about one of 
its sides containing the right angle is a perfect scheme for 
its making. The universal principle goes through and 
determines every part of the process, and except as you can 
so carry the principle through the process you can never 
determine that you have made an exact cone. In this per- 
fect scheme for the fact we have beforehand a complete 
Idea of the fact. But so far, this is only a science of the 
possible and not yet a science of any reality. Perhaps 
there is no actual maker, or no existing material, that shall 
secure such a fact really to be. The animal could not make 
the exact cone if he had the material, and the rational man 
could not make it if he had no other than fluid materials. 

Some really existing fact must be given in w T hich we 
can find a Law running all through it, and which gives 
exact relationship to, and is an ^wforming bond for, all the 
parts, and which expounds the being and working of the 
whole thing, and in that law we shall have a science of the 
thing. If the Law, however, be only hypothetical, viz., 
that which would expound the thing if we knew the Law 
itself were true, or which we assume to be true and univer- 
sal because it serves so well to the extent that we can apply 
it, then is the science of that fact only inductive or empiri- 
cal ; viz., good or valid so far as the induction of particular 



GENERAL METHOD. *J$ 

experiences has gone. But if we can take the Law and find 
it to be in complete accordance with the Idea which has 
been determined by an Eternal principle, then have we a 
science for the Law, as well as for the fact in the Law, and 
such becomes a transcendental or rational science of a real- 
ity. We know both that the fact is, and how it is. The 
reality has a Law determined in an Eternal principle, and 
thus both Law and Idea come together in exact correspond- 
ence. The only valid criterion for true science is, then, 
this determined correspondence of Idea and Law. 

It will make no difference which is first found the Law 
or the Idea. The fact taken will ordinarily lead to the 
Law, and the study of the Law in the fight of reason will 
bring out the Idea, and thus the science will be learned ; or 
the Idea may be first attained in the reason, and the fact 
made from it, and this put as law into the fact, and thus the 
science will be created. But whether as creator or learner, 
in each case the Idea in the reason and the Law in the fact 
are both attained, and found to be in complete accordance. 
The Inventor of the steam-engine first had the Idea, the 
observer first had the Law, but both come to have Idea and 
Law in known correspondence. 

And now it is the Intellect itself that we seek to bring 
within this exact science. We strive to attain a Rational 
Psychology. 

By attaining the different intellectual faculties and their 
functions of operation in all ways of knowing, and before- 
hand seeing how a way to a rational demonstration may be 
made to lie over this groundwork of a necessary idea con- 
formed to an objective law, we shall at once determine what 
our General Method must be. 

4 



74 RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 

Mind is an agent, spontaneous in its activity, and puts 
forth its agency in three distinct capacities — the sentient, the 
intellectual, and the voluntary. The products of these spe- 
cific capacities of action may be termed respectively, sensa- 
tions, cognitions, and volitions : the capacities themselves 
are the Sensibility, the Intellect, and the Will. The mind 
as one agent is competent for action in these three capaci- 
ties. Rational Psychology is conversant with all these 
capacities, but is more particularly concerned with the func- 
tions of the Intellect, and with the others as conditional for 
this, rather than giving to them a direct attention. 

The Intellect is inclusive of the entire capacity for 
knowing, and is the source for all cognitions attainable 
through whatever faculty. The cognitions differ, not 
numerically merely, but also in kind, as they are the prod- 
ucts of the Intellect through different faculties. These dif- 
ferent faculties are, the sense, the understanding, and 
the reason. What these are respectively as distinguished 
from each other, and what their relations and dependencies, 
will better appear in the progress of our investigation. It 
is of importance here only to note, that their distinction is 
fundamental, and any confounding of one with the others 
must necessarily induce, not obscurity merely, but errors, 
contradictions, and absurdities. These three faculties 
include all the powers of human intelligence, and fill our 
entire capacity for intellectual action ; nor may we attain 
the conceptions of any other form of intellectual agency for 
any being. So far as human conception can reach, we have 
exhausted the entire subject of psychological investigation 
in reference to all possible forms of knowledge, when we 
have attained the functions, and their law of operation 



GENEEAL METHOD. *J5 

respectively, of the. Sense, the Understanding, and the Rea- 
son. 

Inasmuch as our design is not the mere attainment of 
the cognitions given in any or all of these faculties, and 
which would stand only as simple appearance in conscious- 
ness ; but much further than this, viz., the law for the pro- 
cess itself, and thereby an interpretation of the intellectual 
agency, and not merely a consciousness of the products of 
this agency ; it becomes necessary that we attain the subjec- 
tive idea of each distinct faculty, and also the objective law 
of each, and the determination that they stand to each other 
as correlatives. The appearance in consciousness may be 
termed knowledge ; but it is only the philosophical interpre- 
tation of the process by which this knowledge as appear- 
ance in consciousness is attained, that can properly be 
termed science. And, moreover, since it is not from expe- 
rience that we seek to attain our subjective idea — which 
could only attain to the affirmation that so our form of cog- 
nition is ; or, that so in future it must be, on the hypotheti- 
cal assumption that all experience must be uniform ; and in 
this way merely an inductive science, which is incompetent 
to exclude skepticism from its very foundation — but we 
seek this subjective idea as transcendental, and conditional 
for any experience in knowing, and such as that according 
to it only is the process of intellectual agency at all possi- 
ble, and thereby attaining to a rational science which may 
expel all skepticism from both foundation and superstruc- 
ture ; it becomes necessary that we attain to a position 
which transcends all experience, and in that pure region 
intelligently and demonstrably possess ourselves of the con- 
ditioning idea, determinative of how a knowledge in the 



76 RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 

sense, and in the understanding, and in the reason, respect- 
ively, is possible to be, and, therefore, if such knowledge 
ever actually is, how it must be. 

But, further, inasmuch as such subjective idea is but a 
mere void thought, and only determinative of how it is pos- 
sible a knowledge may be in either one of the faculties of 
the sense, the understanding, and the reason, it becomes 
necessary that we go further, in the case of each, and attain, 
in the actual facts of such different kinds of cognitions, a 
manifest law running through the facts and binding them up 
in systematic order ; and then also determine that this law 
in the facts, is the exact correlative of that determined idea, 
which it had already been found must regulate all possible 
experience in knowing. 

Our work thus necessarily divides itself into three parts 
— the Faculty of the Sense ; of the Understanding ; and of 
the Reason. We must attain the subjective Idea for each, 
and also the objective Law of each ; and in each case deter- 
mine the correlation of the idea and the law respectively. 
In this we shall have reduced each faculty of knowledge to 
a rational science, and in this Rational Psychology will be 
completed. Moreover, in these conclusions of Rational 
Psychology, we shall find the data for demonstrating the 
valid being of the objects given through these intellectual 
faculties ; and thus in each department we may add also the 
outlines of an Ontological Demonstration. 



PART I. 

THE SENSE. 



DEFINITIONS AND SPECIFIC METHOD. 

In the Sense I include our whole faculty for bringing 
any object within the distinct light of consciousness, and 
making it there immediately to appear ; and such cogni- 
tions, as appearance in consciousness, constitute knowledge 
in the sense. The intellectual agency, which takes up these 
appearances in consciousness as distinct objects of knowl- 
edge, I term apprehension. When the apprehension is that 
of appearance having position and figure in space, it is of 
the external sense; when the apprehension is that of 
appearance determinative of the inner state and agency of 
the mind itself, and thus that the states and acts of the 
mind become its own objects in consciousness, it is of the 
internal sense. The completed process in the functions of 
the sense is perception, viz., the taking of the appearance as 
object given in consciousness through some medium. The 
appearance, as object perceived, is called phenomen on. The 
states and acts of the mind apprehended in the internal 
sense, as truly as the objects apprehended in the external 
sense, and which have position or shape in space, are phe- 



78 THE SENSE. 

nomena ; since they all appear in consciousness and are thus 
perceived. We as truly perceive a thought or an emotion, 
as we do a color or a sound. The phenomenon has its mat- 
ter and its form. The matter is the content which is given 
from somewhere in the sensibility ; and the form is that 
modification of the matter which permits that it may be 
classified, or ordered in particular relationships with other 
phenomena. 

The capacity for receiving the content, as matter for a 
phenomenon, is sensibility. The affection induced by the 
reception of the content in the sensibility is sensation. In 
this we include the affection particularly which precedes per- 
ception, and is conditional for it. The eye or the ear, as 
organ of sensibility, may be affected in a content from some- 
where given, as by the rays of light or the undulations of 
the air, and this impression or affection is it precisely, which 
we mean by sensation, and which is the condition for the 
intellectual apprehension and perception. There is, also, an 
affection of the inner state which may succeed the percep- 
tion, and for which the perception is conditional. The per- 
ceived landscape, or music, etc., may affect the inner state 
agreeably or otherwise, and such affection, if called a sensa- 
tion, should be distinguished from the result of an organic 
affection. We might call the organic sensibility the Sen- 
sorium, and the sensibility of the inner state the Sensory / 
and the products or affections in the first, sensations ; and 
those in the last, emotions ; and the distinction would be 
sufficiently marked. But in the case of knowledge through 
sense, we have occasion only for a reference to that which 
precedes perception, and shall not need here, therefore, to 
recognize any such distinction. 



SPECIFIC METHOD. 79 

The faculty for giving form to the matter in the sensa- 
tion is the Imagination. It is the faculty which conjoins 
and defines — the constructing faculty — and is a peculiar 
intellectual process, which may hereafter in our work be 
better disclosed. It is sufficient here to say, that while this 
is essentially the same operation that gives form to the 
material already in sensation, and that which constructs 
form in pure space; i. e., it is the same agency which gives 
roundness to the ring or the wheel in sensation, as that 
which constructs the roundness of a mathematical circle in 
pure space; yet is the term Imagination more appropri- 
ately applied to the latter than the former. The last is 
purely the work of the intellect, and thus wholly from ima- 
gination; the first has been conditioned in its intellectual 
agency by the content in sensation. They may be distin- 
guished as an act of attention, and an act of imagination. 

An object which is void of all content in sensation, and 
has only its limits constructed in space or time, is termed 
pure; while such object as has a content in the sense is 
termed empirical. Thus, any mathematical diagram is pure 
object ; and any color, or weight, or sound, etc., is empirical 
object. Intuition is an immediate beholding ; and is pure 
intuition when the beholding is in reference to a pure 
object, and empirical intuition when the beholding is in 
reference to an empirical object. Thus, the immediate 
beholding of three times three mathematical points in space 
• • • to be nine, is a pure intuition ; but the immediate 
beholding of three times three material balls, or counters, 
to be nine balls or counters, is an empirical intuition. Inas- 
much as the whole field in which the objects are given in 
the sense is to be examined, we shall have occasion to make 



80 THE SENSE. 

a Division in this part of our work, and attain the subjec- 
tive idea of the process in the sense in the construction and 
apprehension of pure objects, and also of empirical objects. 
And here we are ready to give the Specific Method of 
our process of Rational Psychology for the faculty of the 
Sense. We isolate this from all the other functions for 
knowing, and must in our first Chapter, from an a priori 
position, attain the subjective Idea of how perception in 
sense is possible ; and, as this must include both the form in 
the apprehension and the content in the sensation, so there 
must be the two Divisions, the Idea in the pure Intuition, 
and the Idea in the empirical Intuition. In a second Chap- 
ter, we must attain an objective Law in the facts of percep- 
tion, and determine the correlation of this Idea and Law. 
We may then give the outline of an Ontological Demon- 
stration, 



CHAPTER I. 

THE SENSE IN ITS SUBJECTIVE IDEA. 



FIRST DIVISION. 

THE IDEA IN THE PURE INTUITION. 



SECTION I. 

THE ATTAINMENT OF AN A P EI OB I POSITION. 

All human knowledge begins in experience. Except 
phenomena are given in the sense, and the intellect quick- 
ened into activity in perception, it can exert neither the 
faculty of the understanding nor the reason, but the human 
mind remains a void and no cognition is possible. We 
must begin our intellectual action in sensation. But experi- 
ence can include the real and the limited only, while there 
are cognitions of the strictly necessary and universal ; and 
thus is it manifest that our intellectual agency, which begins 
in the perceptions of the sense, is not confined to experience 
merely. All Mathematical Axioms, at least, are a priori 
cognitions, independent of power, not deducible from any 
data in experience, but including all possible experience, and 
in their own light seen to be necessary and universal. That 
a straight line is the shortest which can join any two points; 

4* 



82 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

that no two straight lines can enclose a space ; that any two 
sides of a triangle must together be greater than a third 
side, etc., are cognitions not possible to be given in experi- 
ence, for no experience comprehends them while they 
include all possible experience. They are no product of 
power, for they condition all power in their own necessity 
of being ; they are no deduction from facts, for they are 
inclusive of universal facts. We shall in our progress find 
wide regions of necessary truth, as independent of the 
experience given in sensation as mathematical axioms, and 
which the human mind may possess as cognitions; and 
thus the fact is plain, that while the intellect begins its 
agency in the functions of the sense, it yet subsequently 
attains cognitions which are altogether beyond every pos- 
sible empirical apprehension. 

And, here, our first care is to lay open a plain passage 
from the phenomenal to the transcendental, and attain a 
position upon such a priori cognitions as shall subserve our 
main design in a Rational Psychology, and by such a pro- 
cess as. shall admit of clear and satisfactory examination at 
every step ; and thus, having taken our position out from 
experience, we may proceed to the philosophical investiga- 
tion of how experience must be. 

The Intellect may not take a leap in the dark out of the 
world of seaase in which its agency begins into the pure 
region of rational cognitions, but must be competent to 
expound to. itself and to others how it has reached its start- 
ing point in a transcendental philosophy. A surreptitious 
passage is, also, equally as inadmissible as a blind and pre- 
sumptuous leap to the necessary and the universal. Dog- 
matism may arbitrarily assume, or sophistry may wrap itself 



AN A PEIOEI POSITION ATTAINED 



% 



in specious fallacies stealthily to take, the ground on which 
is to be built a rational philosophy, but in no such way shall 
we establish a title for science, or dispossess the skeptic of 
the territory he has usurped. We must be able first to 
trace our pathway out from, and be competent to return 
again to, the familiar region of the phenomenal, and to 
determine its bearings and distances from the purely intellec- 
tual. We shall thus readily determine, that though subse- 
quently attained by us, yet is the necessary and the univer- 
sal the truly primitive region. In the process of our intel- 
lectual acquirement the empirical is first, but in the order of 
conditioned relations the empirical is last. In this point of 
view the distinction made between a logical and a chrono- 
logical order is significant. As logical condition the neces- 
sary and the universal are before the conditioned and the 
partial ; the possible before the actual, the intellectual before 
the phenomenal. Just as in the work of nature the germ 
precedes the plant ; the embryo is before the adult ; the 
cause antecedent to the effect. Yet as in nature, empiri- 
cally apprehended, we are forced to reverse the process, so 
is it also in Empirical Psychology. In learning nature in 
experience we do not first find ourselves at the original 
sources of her secret operations, but quite upon the outside 
of all her products. We can not look on and watch the 
progress of her mysterious developments, as the work goes 
onward from the central salient point to its consummation ; 
but we must retrace, as we may, what has been done by 
following back the print of her footsteps. Thus, in the 
intellectual operations, we first find the phenomenal as 
already given, and then go back to the intellectual; we 
have first the, fact, and then we search out the principle ; 



8f 



THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 



first the knowledge, then the scientific conditions by which 
it was possible we should know. Thus the first is last, and 
the last is first. With the phenomenal in possession it is 
incumbent, first, to find our way out to the purely intellec- 
tual, and having attained the transcendental position, there 
note that though chronologically last found, yet that logi- 
cally it was first, and necessarily conditional for the phe- 
nomenal from whence we started. 

Commencing with the phenomenal, the process will be 
to make an abstraction of all that has come into conscious- 
ness through sensation, and thereby find that which was 
prior to, and conditional for, the perception. When the 
matter shall be taken away, the real form will remain ; and 
when that which gave reality to the form is taken away, the 
possible or pure form only is left, and this pure form separ- 
ated into its pure diversity is the primitive intuition. 

I. The primitive intuition for all phenomena of an ex- 
ternal sense. — Whatever object we may apprehend in an 
experience — a house, tree, mountain, etc., — it is for the 
sense ; and as phenomenal, an assemblage of single qualities 
only. We now take any such object — a house— and pro- 
ceed to make abstraction of the several phenomena which 
any organs of sense have given in the perception. Color 
has appeared, and Ave now exclude it ; smoothness or rough- 
ness, hard or soft, weight or resistance, as they have been 
given, we now take away ; and so also of sounds, odors, 
tastes, or any qualities of any possible function of the sense, 
we now remove ; and thus make a complete abstraction of 
all content which the entire sensibility may have received. 
We shall have still remaining the void place which had been 
occupied by the qualities now abstracted. This remains for 



AN A PEIOEI POSITION ATTAINED 85 

the intellect alone, and is as nothing in the experience ; but 
for the intellect it remams immovable and indestructible. 
It remains in defiance of all further attempts to a more com- 
plete abstraction in that place. It is the real/brm of that 
object from which the content has now been utterly taken 
away. 

But, although we have taken away all content of sense, 
and can not go farther and take away the place, still have 
we not taken away all product of the intellect. There is a 
defined and limited place, a constructed form which has real 
outline and shape, and we may intellectually proceed fur- 
ther in this direction with our abstraction, and take away 
that which limits and defines this void place, and thus anni- 
hilate that in which its unity and wholeness exists. We 
have then a void which is limitless, undefined, unconjoined 
into any total, and which is simply a pure intuition of what 
is possible for form and content. 

In this abstraction of all content and all form, and thus 
the removal of all that can come into any outer experience, 
we have taken away that which can be common to us with 
others, and have left only a limitless void, which, as similar 
in each, lies distinct in each one's consciousness who has 
made the complete abstraction. There are as many limit- 
less voids as there are subjective consciousnesses in which 
the content and form has been taken away. They can not 
now, in the absence of all outer object, commune with each 
other, but each one is shut in within his own limitless void 
in his own consciousness. Still, each one can proceed with 
a further abstraction. The void in each is limitless, but it is 
still in unity. Every part is a concrete with every other 
part. The abstraction may proceed to take away that 



86 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

which holds all parts in connection to all others, and we 
shall have left a limitless void, wholly unconstructed in 
unity, and standing in the subjective consciousness as so 
many contiguous void points, which do not coalesce 
together. The limitless void is a manifold of void limits, 
which stand only as pure limits, without any limited. And 
here it is impossible that we should carry the abstrac- 
tion further in any direction. As the condition that a sense 
should be in which the phenomenal may be given in any ex- 
tension as real form, there must be, as its back-ground in the 
consciousness, this manifoldness of void points. Take this 
away, and no place can be made in which the phenomenal 
can appear in real form. Attempt to take this away, and 
you are stopped in the very absurdity of the process ; the 
void limit must still be, even in the very point from whence 
it is assumed to have been abstracted. This is pure space as 
given in a primitive intuition. When I have in conscious- 
ness a mathematical line, circle, or other diagram, I have 
such mathematical figure in pure intuition, but such con- 
struction of the figure was possible on the condition only 
that there was first the void points in the primitive intui- 
tion. 

Pure space in the primitive intuition is thus a rational 
cognition necessary and universal. Though now attained 
in abstraction from experience, and in chronological order 
subsequent to experience, yet is it a priori conditional for 
experience and without which no appearance of outer object 
could be. It is a transcendental cognition, and yet in its 
necessity is more valid than any phenomenon in the sense 
can be. 

II. Tne primitive intuition for all the phenomena of an 



AN A PRIORI POSITION ATTAINED. 87 

internal sense. — In the light of consciousness we discrimin. 
ate between one mental exercise and another, and thereby 
distinguish all the different products of our mental func- 
tions, such as thoughts, emotions, purposes, etc. These are 
quite different phenomena in kind from all such as appear 
externally in space, and must therefore have their pure form 
originated in some different primitive intuition. 

We may take any phenomena as they come and depart 
in our inner consciousness and thus produce changes in the 
internal state. It may be a train of thought as passing in 
consciousness. As one thought comes and departs for the 
introduction of another, the apprehension of them must be in 
succession, and the consciousness possesses them as sequences 
in a series. If then we abstract the phenomenal thoughts 
in the train and thus take away all the content in these suc- 
cessions, there will remain the instants in which each stood 
in the series, and which will in connection give a void pe- 
riod that had been occupied by the passing thoughts now 
abstracted. This abides for the intellect only, and resists 
all efforts that it should be taken away. It is a real form, 
for the content taken away, and is itself quite indestructible. 

And so to the same end, we may take any passing phe- 
nomena of the external senses. As apprehended by the In- 
tellect, they affect the internal state as does a passing 
thought, and as the perception of one phenomenon passes 
and another arises in consciousness, the inner sense is deter- 
mined as successive in its affections, and this content must 
fill a period in the inner sense as truly as a place in the ex- 
ternal sense. If then we make an entire abstraction of the 
phenomena perceived, and thus also of the perceptions as 
affecting the internal state,, we shall have the successions in 



88 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

the instants in which they occurred, and which, as limited by 
their beginning and terminating, is a void period as the real 
form in the internal sense, and which in the abstraction of 
the content is itself left indestructible. While, however, 
we have taken away all phenomenal content and can not go 
further and take away the duration in the period, still may 
we carry the intellectual abstraction to a further degree. 
We may take away the limits which begin and terminate 
the period, and thus annihilate that which gives to it individ- 
uality and definiteness, and there will then be duration lim- 
itless and indefinite, and standing out as the bare possibility 
of what may be limited into formal periods and filled by 
phenomenal successions. 

In this removal of all content and form from the dura- 
tion, we have taken away that which can give a common 
duration to ourselves with others, and can now only each 
one have his own duration in his own consciousness. The 
successions go on in his own internal sense, and no one can 
commune with the successions going on in another's con- 
sciousness. Still may each one carry the abstraction to a 
more full degree. The duration in each is limitless 'but still 
a duration in a connected sequence. The sequences are all 
concrete and the series a perpetual continuity. We may 
then take away that which connects the sequences in con- 
tinued series, and we shall have not only an emptiness of all 
phenomena and limitation, but an exclusion of all coalescing 
of the instants, and only these instants in their diversity and 
manifoldness will remain, as the bare possibility of what 
may be combined into continuous duration and constructed 
into successive periods. No further abstraction is possible, 
for all attempt to take away the instant and have that which 



AN A rEIOEI POSITION ATTAINED. 89 

is empty of all instants in which some instant might again 
stand is an absurdity. Here then is pure time as given in a 
primitive intuition, and which is conditional for all arith- 
metical number as given in a pure intuition. 

Pure time in the primitive intuition is thus a necessary 
and universal rational cognition, attained chronologically by 
experience and yet conditional for experience, and more cer- 
tain than any appearance in experience can be. 

Inasmuch as all phenomena must be given in an external 
or an internal sense ; and pure space is the primitive intuition 
for all possible phenomena of an external sense which must 
have place, and pure time is the primitive intuition for all 
possible phenomena of an internal sense which must have 
period ; we have in pure space and time the primitive intui- 
tion for all possible phenomena. And as we have taken 
pure space as one transcendental position, we may now also 
take pure time as another, satisfied that they are both given 
in an a priori cognition, and that they give to us the possi- 
bility for all the real forms in which the intellect can order 
any appearance in the sense. 

Now, it is altogether true, that the faculty of the sense 
can not overlook and in an a priori manner examine itself, 
and go back and take up positions out of itself; and if we 
had no other faculty than that of perception in sensation, 
and the capability of abstracting comparing and combining 
what had been given in sensation, most certainly we could 
attain no transcendental positions. It would be like asking 
the eye to see itself, or the touch to feel itself; thus demand- 
ing that experience should bring itself within its own cir- 
cumscription and by subjecting itself to its own action liter- 
ally experience itself. But certainly we encounter no such 



90 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

absurdity when we assume a faculty higher than that of the 
sense, and which is competent to make the very conditions 
of sense its objects of cognition ; and that the possesson of 
such higher faculty is not mere assumption, beside the 
demonstration which will be given in its proper place, we 
have already sufficient evidence hi the above results. If all 
cognition must be of that only which is first given m the 
sensation, then certainly the primitive intuition of pure 
space and time must be an impossibility. When we have 
taken away the content of sense we should have no possible 
cognition left. Space and time would be not only void, but 
it would be a void of space and of time ; and the intuition 
that pure space and time were prior to the content put 
within them, and conditional for the possibility that such 
content should appear, would be preposterous. It would be 
making the sense cognize that which is prior to, and condi- 
tional for, its own action. Pure space and time are never 
an appearance in sense, nor at all a part of what is given in 
sense, and the fact that we cognize them at all is the evi- 
dence of a higher faculty than sense, and especially that we 
cognize them to be necessarily and universally conditional 
for all perception in sense. 

We are making no assumptions merely, and standing 
upon no mere chimeras, when we take up our position, in 
the primitive intuition, upon the a priori cognitions of pure 
space and time. That they are the jmmitive forms for all 
possible phenomena, that they are a priori to, and condi- 
tional for, all phenomena, is seen in their necessity and 
universality. 



CONSTRUCTION OF FORM. 91 

SECTION II. 

THE PROCESS OP AN A PEIOEI CONSTRUCTION OP EEAL POEM 
IN PUEE SPACE AND TIME. 

Space and time are given in the intuition. They are 
immediately beheld, and this irrespective of any content in 
the sensibility, and are thus pure Intuition ; and as prior to 
any real forms, and only conditional for all possible forms of 
figure and period, they are primitive Intuition. As purely 
in the primitive intuition, they are wholly limitless, and void 
of any conjunction in unity, having themselves no figure nor 
period, and having within themselves no figure nor period, 
but only a pure diversity in which any possible conjunction 
of definite figures and periods may, in some way, be effected. 
We now begin our work from this transcendental position, 
and our first business is to determine the process by which a 
conjunction may be effected, and real forms be constructed 
in pure space and time. 

Although we have come from the phenomenal in sense 
out to this pure condition for all that may be phenomena, by 
abstracting all that has been given in the sensibility and the 
intellectual agency, yet can abstraction be of no further 
avail. We now seek, not the process of attaining a real 
form by beginning with some phenomenon, and taking away 
its content in the sensibility thereby leaving its void form in 
the intellect, which would be but an empirical process ; but 
we begin at the other extreme of the process, and seek to 
construct our real forms from the formless and limitless 
space and time as given in the primitive intuition, and in 
this a priori process determine how a construction of real 



92 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

forms in space and time is possible ; and thereby for what- 
ever is, a determination a priori how it must have been, 
and for all that is to be, how only it is possible that it 
should be. 

And here, with space and time as given in the primitive 
intuition, where all is mere diversity without any conjunc- 
tion in unity, and therefore wholly limitless and indefinite — 
where all possible position, shape and period may be, but 
where no fixed position, defined figure, and limited period 
yet is — it is manifest that nothing can appear as real form 
in any intellectual apprehension, except as in some way this 
real form be constructed as product within this primitive 
intuition. As utterly void of all construction and product, 
pure space and time must ever so remain, except as invaded 
by some constructing agency, which shall conjoin what is 
diverse, and limit what is indefinite, and thereby produce 
real bounded and united forms within the void intuition. 
Pure space and time are not agents that may collect them- 
selves into definite and discriminate portions of each, and 
affix precise limits within themselves, by which their parts 
may possess outline and each become one whole figure in 
space or period in time. Some agency ab extra must make 
such conjunctions, and give such limits. But the primitive 
intuition is no agent for constructing, producing, and limit- 
ing ; this is a mere immediate beholding of what is, and no 
producer of it. Thus, as no constructed real form is in pure 
space and time, the primitive intuition can never of itself 
attain such real form. The intellectual agency as imagina- 
tion, or form constructer, which Coleridge calls the eisem- 
plastic power, from ecg evirXdrretv to shape into one, must 
introduce itself within the void, and produce its real forms 



CONSTRUCTION OF FOEM. 93 

for its own subjective apprehension. The primitive intui- 
tions of space and time can never take real form within 
themselves, and which may be apprehended as definite 
figure and period, except through such intellectual con- 
struction. 

We will, therefore, look minutely to this entire process 
of an intellectual construction of real forms in pure space 
and time, inasmuch as in this will be found the subjective 
idea of the sense in the pure intuition. In this section we 
will give this agency in its results only, and reserve for con- 
sideration in future sections the more profound and difficult 
work of attaining the a priori principles of the process. 

I. The construction of real forms in pure space. — Let 
there be an intellectual agency given, which may come 
within the field of the primitive intuition in pure space, and 
exert its constructive faculty therein, and let us notice what 
must be its results. In the spontaneity of its own functions 
it moves through the void in pure space, constantly within 
the intuition, and is thus perpetually and directly beheld in 
all its progress. In the as yet uncollected diversity in pure 
space, this agency is in the field of the primitive intuition, 
and at that point in the diversity of pure space a position is 
taken. The void is no longer empty. A point is made to 
stand distinctly in the intuition, and is a limit as beginning 
or starting-point in the process. As this agency moves 
onward there are perpetually new positions attained, and 
new points made to stand out prominently and precisely in 
the intuition. So far as this agency goes in its spontaneity, 
it has brought the diverse points through which it passed 
into a conjunction, and made its own pathway precise and 
plain by collecting into itself the points as continuous con- 



94 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

tiguity. Here, then, is a definite, real form as product of 
the intellectual agency. There is the limit or starting-point, 
as beginning ; the perpetuated product in the continuous 
points all conjoined in the progressive movement ; and there 
is the limit, as terminating point of this agency ; and here 
first arises in the intuition a completed product, and a defi- 
nite real form— the mathematical line — appears. Pure 
space is no longer void diversity as given in the primitive 
intuition, but a conjunction of some of the diversity has 
been effected, and a line as one whole in its unity is cog- 
nized. This is wholly a product of the productive imagina- 
tion and has subjective reality only, hence as void of all 
empirical content it is pure object, and is cognized in pure 
intuition • but, as being real form produced in pure space, 
there is more than the mere diversity in the primitive intui- 
tion. 

And now, nothing hinders, that such an intellectual 
agency may be possible in its going forth to the construc- 
tion of all possible forms in pure space. Right lines, and 
lines which shall be joined in their terminations in all possi- 
ble relative directions, and thus holding between them all 
possible angles, and which may enclose all possible rectilin- 
ear figures, may be constructed. Curved lines, and of all 
possible circularity and modification of curvature, and meet- 
ing in the construction of all j)ossible curvilinear angles and 
figures, and the blending of right and curved fines in all 
possible modifications of mutual relationship in angle and 
shape, may be produced from all possible positions in pure 
space. All the real forms possible in pure space are thus of 
practicable production in a pure intuition. In the particu- 
lar is given the universal, and it is an a priori cognition, 



CONSTRUCTION OF FOEM. 95 

that as one pure object may be thus constructed, so it is 
competent that all the real forms which pure space may 
receive can in the same way be constructed. And as such 
construction may be, so also it is an a priori cognition that, 
if at all, thus they must be constructed. The primitive 
intuition can give the diversity in its unconjoined manifold- 
ness only ; and if any conjunction, in the unity of a definite 
real form as pure object, be effected, it must be through the 
constructing agency of some eisemplastic or form-producing 
faculty. The pure object must be given to the pure intui- 
tion, by some intellectual agency constructing it within the 
field of its immediate beholding. We have in this way the 
process of an intellectual agency, or productive imagination, 
which results in ana priori possibility for all real forms in 
pure space. 

II. The construction of real forms in pure time. — Time 
as pure in the primitive intuition, is like pure space utterly 
unconjoined and indefinite. It is conditional for all possible 
periods, but as yet it is wholly a diversity of instants, and 
no definite and limited period has been given within it. 
The intuition can not construct, but only immediately be- 
hold what may be constructed. The same intellectual agent 
as productive imagination before noticed, but in a somewhat 
modified view of the agency, must construct the real form 
as pure period within the primitive intuition. As time is 
the primitive intuition for the internal sense, and all deter- 
mination of succession in time rests upon the determination 
of changes in the inner state, so all construction of period 
must demand that the inner state be, in some way, continu- 
ously modified in its affection. And that this modified 
affection, as change of the inner state may be determined, it 



96 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

must be made to stand in a relationship in the intuition to 
some permanent. Mere movement can not determine suc- 
cession, but only movement in reference to somewhat that is 
permanent ; and as the period to be constructed is pure, so 
the permanent must be in the pure intuition also. And 
now, all the above requisites may be attained in the follow- 
ing way, and are wholly impracticable in any other manner. 
Let the intellectual agency be conceived as moviDg along 
a pure line in space. This line is itself a permanent in the 
intuition, and every point in the line is a permanent, and as 
the intellectual agency passes along the line within the im- 
mediate field of the intuition, the movement as change of 
place gives continuous modification to the inner state, and 
this succession of affection in the internal sense is the deter- 
mination that a time is passing. The movement is that which 
is here alone regarded, and not the line as product of the 
movement. This intellectual agency is commenced at a 
given point in the line, and at that given point the affection 
in the inner state begins, and as the movement passes on- 
ward the inner state is continuously modified, until at length 
the movement terminates in another point in the line and 
the modification in the inner state ceases. At each contigu- 
ous point in the line there has been a coincident modification 
of the inner state, as the intellectual movement passed along 
from instant to instant in the intuition, and in each modifica- 
tion of the inner state a moment of time has passed, and 
thus successively from the commencement to the termina- 
tion of the moving agency, and thereby a definite period has 
been constructed, in which the instants have been conjoined 
in unity by the movement and limited on each side as a 
complete whole. 



CONSTEUCTION OF FOKJ[. 97 

This is more than mere diversity in the primitive intui- 
tion of time, since a real conjunction of the diverse instants 
has been effected and a completed limit set to it, and thus a 
real form produced ; but inasmuch as there is no content of 
the sensibility it is pure object only, and existing merely in 
the subjective intuition. And here, it is plain, that nothing 
hinders the construction of all possible periods that may be 
in time, of all possible varieties of duration. The primitive 
intuition gives the diversity of time in its indefiniteness, and 
the productive imagination may move on in any extension 
of a line of instants and give its modifications to the inner 
state, and thereby its definite succession of moments, and in 
this way its pure periods as real forms in time to any possi- 
ble degree that such pure periods can be in time. And as 
all possible periods may be so constructed, so also it is an a 
priori cognition that if any is constructed at all it must be- 
in this manner. The primitive intuition can not construct^, 
but an agency must move within it, and conjoin what is 
diverse in its manifoldness into one completed product, and 
which may thus be intuitively seen in its definiteness, and its 
distinctness from all other constructed periods. 

With pure space and time in the primitive intuition- 
open to an intellectual constructing agency, all possible fig- 
ures in space and periods in time may become pure objects 
in the subjective intuition. And this is the only possible 
method of attaining real forms from the primitive intuition. 
I can have no line in pure space, except as by my construc- 
tive agency I draw the line ; and no other figure in pure 
space, except as through the same agency I describe that 
figure ; nor can I have any period in pure time, except as 
through an intellectual agency I successively affect my inner 

5 



98 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

state, and in the conjunction of the instants construct the 
period. In this manner may all possible real forms in pure 
space and time be given in a pure intuition, but in no other 
manner can any real form be effected. We have thus a con- 
ditioning principle, rationally determined, that all possible 
pure objects in space and time must be constructed by an 
intellectual agency. 

Let it here be noted that pure space and time in the 
primitive intuition offer nothing to invite, to guide or to hin- 
der an intellectual constructing agency. In the spontaneity 
of the productive imagination, all possible real forms may 
be thus given. This result being attained it is demanded 
that its process be subjected to a much deeper analysis, and 
in which many points of difficult explanation must be care- 
fully examined. To this we proceed in the next section. 



SECTION III 



THE PKIMTTrVE ELEMENTS OP ALL POSSIBLE FORMS IN PURE 
SPACE AND TIME. 

The diversity of points in space and of instants in time 
as given in the primitive intuition is wholly subjective, and 
lying for each one in his inner consciousness. The intellect- 
ual agency moves for each within the same inner conscious- 
ness subjectively, and thus both the primitive intuition of 
space and time and the constructing intellectual agency are 
conditional for the completion of all real forms, and without 
both of which no faculty of sense, or function for appre- 
hending phenomena, could be. The subjective pure form 



PKIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF CONJUNCTION. 99 

and the objective empirical content must alike stand con- 
structed in consciousness, and the elements in one will be 
the elements in both. 

In attaining these primitive elements for constructing 
forms we shall be able to determine for them that they must 
be, and that so many, must be, and thus both their necessity 
and completeness. There must be the Primitive Intellec- 
tual Operation, and this must have its specific Primitive 
Elements, and which we here proceed to attain. 

We have already examined the general process for the 
possibility of real form in pure space and time, and found 
that as the primitive intuition does not construct, an intel- 
lectual agency must construct the pure object. This is done 
by conjoining that which was before diverse and unlimited 
in the primitive intuition, and bringing it by this agency 
into a completed and defined pure object. Thus all figures 
in space and all periods in time may be constructed. This, 
then, is the intellectual operation to be here specially con- 
sidered, that we may attain the a priori elements which 
enter into the process. It is properly a constructing agency, 
and as this is effected by conjoining what before was uncon- 
joined or diverse, it is the work of conjunction that we 
are to examine, and see what are the elements conditional 
for it. What are the primitive elements in the operation of 
conjunction f 

1. In the primitive intuition of pure space and time 
nothing is conjoined, and thus no product can be cognized 
because nothing is produced. Such possible product is the 
result of a constructive agency, and this must be effected 
by conjunction. And now, what must be the first element 
in the a priori operation of conjunction f This may be 



100 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

determined by an immediate beholding in pure space and 
time. 

The intellectual agency in conjunction must not merely 
move within the primitive intuition. If there were only a 
mere passing in pure space and time no result could remain, 
for no line as its pathway would be left by the movement. 
It would be a mere passing through the void intuition, 
leaving it still to be void, when the movement had wholly 
transpired. It must, then, be an agency which can take 
up and collect within itself this diversity in the primitive 
intuition as it passes along through it. One point in pure 
space assumed as a position, and made the starting-point 
or commencing limit of the movement, must not be left 
as it was before it had been so assumed, but must be con- 
joined to the point next assumed as position, and this also 
to another, and thus onward to the point which becomes 
the terminating limit of the intellectual movement. If I 
take up any numher of diverse objects one by one, and 
throw away the first when I take the next, no possible 
accumulation can result, because no product can be thus 
generated. Merely to repeat one, one, one, would not be to 
count ; but that any number should be generated in the pro- 
cess, the first one must be retained and conjoined with the 
succeeding one, and thus conjoined they are no longer 
diverse as one, one, but the first is produced into the second 
making them together to be two, and this product of two 
is then produced into the next one, making all together to 
be three, and thus onward through all the progressing 
agency until it terminates. So in the diversity given in 
pure space and time, the agency must collect and conjoin 
within itself in its own movement the diverse points in 



PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF CONJUNCTION. 101 

space or instants in time, and in this conjunction only can 
there be product as a line or a succession. The agency col- 
lects within itself what it takes up in passing, and thus only 
is it intelligent agency. 

And now, as this may be to any degree possible in pure 
space and time, and for any possible amount and modifica- 
tion of figure and period, so also thus it must be for any 
and every figure or period that shall become product there- 
in. Such a conjunction of what is diverse in the primitive 
intuition is a universal necessity for all possible product in 
space and time, and is hence an a priori cognition. All 
possible experience must be regulated by it, and conform to 
it. But this conjoining process is a strictly uniting process 
— it imifies the diverse as given in the primitive intuition, 
and thus pure space and time remain no longer a diversity 
but a unity where this intellectual agency has passed, and 
only where it has passed. In the passing it has collected 
into itself and thereby united what it has taken up, and all 
this is done in the immediate intuition and is thus directly 
beheld. It needs no demonstration, it is already intuition. 
The first element, therefore, in all processes of conjunction 
and thus in all products as real forms in space and time, as 
found by an a priori cognition, is Unity. 

2. As this conjoining process goes on, that which it has 
taken up and gathered within itself, being no longer diverse 
but conjoined, becomes a collection or synthesis, i. e., a 
diversity in unity — and which is the precise conception of a 
multiplicity. A number of diverse points in space, merely 
as they stand in their diversity, may be said to be many 
(multi), inasmuch as it is possible they may be conjoined ; 
but it is by their conjunction, or implication one in an- 



102 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

other, as the product of an intellectual agency, that we 
come to the cognition that it is other than many, it is the 
many united (multi imphciti). As the least that is possi- 
ble in the conception . of unity is that of one conjoined to 
one (unus et plus), which is plurality ; and this admits of 
any possible increase (unus et plus, duo et plus, tres et plus, 
etc.), and is still plurality; this expresses the conception 
more completely than multiplicty. It is so many and more; 
and thus though a unity yet an incomplete process with still 
the agency going on in its work of conjunction. Such, it is 
a priori seen, must be true in all construction of real forms 
in pure space and time. The agency must commence with 
a position as a starting-point, and move to another position 
conjoining it to the first, and in this is unity y and as it is 
one and more (unus et plus), and as yet indeterminate how 
much more, inasmuch as the uniting process is not yet com- 
pleted, it must be a plurality. All conjunction must stand 
thus in the pure intuition, as a begun but incomplete pro- 
duct so long as the agency is in progress, and thus having 
within itself the element of Plurality, 

3. The unity in a plurality, though a condition for all 
real form in pure space and time, yet is not all that is condi- 
tional. The diversity in the primitive intuition is not there- 
by a unit, though in unity. The terminating limit is not yet 
given, and thus it can not be said yet what the completed 
real form shall be. It is in the process of construction, but 
all possible form yet beyond what has been constructed still 
remains in the primitive intuition, and thus open to the con- 
structing intellectual agency, and thereby forbidding that 
we should say more than that there is the unity in a plural- 
ity. There must come the termination of the agency, and 



PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF CONJUNCTION. 103 

the intellect must cease to collect any more of the diversity 
into itself, and thereby affix a terminating limit to the con- 
junction, and thus define what has been united on all sides, 
and then first arises a completed pure object as entire pro- 
duct in space and time. This unity in the plurality com- 
pleted, becomes then a whole, cutting itself off from all 
that is not included within its own circumscription, and 
standing out in the pure intuition as a real form, definite in 
its own constructed totality. All real form must possess a 
total of the plurality in unity, and thus a third primitive 
element is Totality. 

It is now manifest that while no real form in space and 
time can possess less than the elements of unity, plurality ', 
and totality ; so likewise can no pure object possess more 
than these three primitive elements. The whole process of 
construction, for either figure in space or period in time, as 
the intellectual agency enters upon it and goes on to its com- 
pletion, can demand nothing less nor more r than that it take 
up the diverse, and give unity in a plurality which shall ulti- 
mately possess totality. Here, therefore, are all the possible 
elements of all possible conjunction in pure space and time. 

Now of all possible real form thus constructed in pure 
space and time, whether it be that of figure or period, we 
may say that it possesses a Quantity. Quantity is thus the 
general term which is to express all possible real form in 
pure space and time ; and of all possible quantity there may 
be a priori predicated of it, that it must possess unity, plu- 
rality, and totality. It can not possibly be made intelligible,, 
except all the three primitive predicates, as above, belong, to- 
it. In the process above pursued, we may see nofc only that 
our faculty of judgment has so many forms,, giving so many 



104 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

primitive conceptions : but why it has, viz., that a rational 
cognition in pure space and time, through a direct intuition, 
determines that all possible intellectual construction of quan- 
tity must have so many and no more elements. It is not 
possible that any intellect should give quantity in pure space 
and time in any other process or through any other elemen- 
tary conditions. All possible experience of shapes in space 
and successions in time must conform thereto, and so far 
from attaining them by an analysis of any of our intellec- 
tual functions, we determine them to be universally neces- 
sary for all intellectual construction of objects in conscious- 
ness. 

We have in the above, attained all that is necessary in 
the determination of the process of conjunction and of the 
result in a definite and completed form as quantity. But a 
work equally as necessary and quite as abstruse yet remains 
to be accomplished, viz. : What is conditional for the intel- 
lectual agency that it may be competent to such a conjoining 
operation ? Except as this inquiry shall receive a satisfac- 
tory answer, we have brought the subject of Rational Psy- 
chology through but half its difficult way to the attainment 
of the sense in its subjective idea, as necessary to be acquired 
under the first division of the intuition. This, then, will 
form the subject of another section, the determination a 
priori of what is necessary in the intellect, in order that it 
may operate such results in the product of a completed pure 
quantity. 



THE UNITY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 105 



SECTION IV. 

THE UNITY OF S E L F- C O N S C I O U S N E S S . 

The Unity found as a first element in the operation of 
conjunction, and which is conditional for the production of 
all quantity, is itself also a product. The collecting into 
itself the diverse points and instants in pure space and time, 
as its agency passes over the primitive intuition, is the pecu- 
liar work of the intellect, and such collection into itself 
becomes a conjunction in unity, whereby a quantity is first 
generated in the intuition. Such unity can be no product 
of the primitive intuition, but only of a constructing agency 
which performs its work within it, thereby giving real form 
within pure space and time. But what is conditional in this 
intellectual agency itself, that it may be competent to such 
a work of conjoining a diversity in unity ? 

It is manifest that if such agency were in itself diverse, 
and its movement a repetition of single and disjoined acts, 
that it could make no collection, and effect no conjunction, 
and thus could produce no unity in the primitive intuition. 
An agency which was as manifold as the diverse points and 
instants in pure space and time, and thus only an act in its 
own point or instant, would possess no capacity for passing 
over from one point or instant to another, and collecting 
them continuously into a quantity. The agency must, there- 
fore, itself possess a higher unity than that which it pro- 
duces in pure space and time ; and it is only this possession 
of the higher unity that can make the unity in the conjunc- 
tion as product to be possible. And now, the demand is, 

5* 



106 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

that we attain as an a priori cognition, what is conditional 
for this higher unity of the intellectual agency. 

1. It must be competent to more than the simple act. — . 
In order to any conjunction in unity there must be perpetu- 
ated movement ; but the simple act can effect no movement. 
If it were a constant repetition of itself, it would still result 
in no movement. It would be merely an act in one point, 
and a repetition of the act in another point, and thus only 
an alternating agency and not a moving agency. It would 
be simply origination and extinction in the same point, and 
this repeated in any diversity of points could not conjoin them. 
The oscillations of any number of pendulums in diverse 
spaces occurring in alternation, can not conjoin those spaces, 
inasmuch as the agency arises and finishes in its own space, 
and does not pass on to collect into itself that which is 
diverse from its own. As simple act, however perpetually 
repeated and in whatever diversity, can not be a movement 
through the diversity, it can not, therefore, produce any con- 
junction in unity. * In order to this it must be a perpetu- 
ated agency, and though successive in the diverse points 
and instants yet itself in unity through the whole operation. 
In this manner only can the agency conjoin that which is 
diverse through which it passes, and construct a real form 
as product of its movement, and leave it as a result within a 
pure intuition. We will call this condition — The Unity of 
the conjoining agency. 

2. There must be more than the unity of conjoining 
agency. — An agency in unity throughout, moving through 
the diverse points and instants in pure space and time, and 
performing its work in conjoining the diverse points and 
instants in unity, could not yet accomplish anything toward 



UNITY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 107 

giving its products as real forms to the apprehension, when 
the operation went on in darkness. A mere blind move- 
ment could make no product to appear, and hence its whole 
work would yet be as nothing. The perpetuated move- 
ment must be itself in the light, and the whole process of 
conjunction go on in the light, and thereby its product be 
put altogether in the light, or the whole movement of the 
agency must be in vain, and its results hidden from all pos- 
sibility of a revelation. 

And here we must determine what Consciousness is to 
subserve, in this process, toward the apprehension of the 
pure object ; for this light of which we are here speaking is 
the very thing we mean by consciousness. This has cer- 
tainly been very variously described, doubtless very differ- 
ently conceived, and not seldom very much misconceived. 
If we will allow the conception to fashion itself under the 
analogies of an inward illumination rather than as an agent, 
or any faculty of an agent, or any act of such faculty, we 
shall come the nearest to the reality. When the spontane- 
ous agency of the intellect, as productive imagination, has 
conjoined the diversity in the primitive intuition in unity, 
and thereby constructed the pure form as its product, no 
further action is necessary to be supposed. The whole pro- 
cess of the construction, and the completed product, all 
stand out in the mind's own light, and such illumination will 
be available to reveal what has been done, and to show the 
product. The pure object is put within this light, and thus 
the mind possesses it in its own illumination, and this is the 
same as to say that the object stands in consciousness. Not 
as an act, but as a light ; not as a maker — for that is the 
province of the intellectual agency — but rather as a re- 



108 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

vealer : after such analogies shall we doubtless best con- 
ceive of consciousness, and which may thus be termed " the 
light of all our seeing." In this conception, the difficulty 
of cognizing consciousness and determining precisely and 
affirmatively what it is, becomes very obvious. It may be 
competent to evince for itself that it is, while it is not com- 
petent that it should give any representation of itself deter- 
mining what it is. All the intellectual constructions as pro- 
ducts appear in consciousness, but we have no circumscrib- 
ing agency and light out of consciousness, by which con- 
sciousness may itself be made to appear. It is that inward 
illumination in which all that is therein constructed may 
appear, while itself is a light too pure and transparent to 
admit that it should be seen. 

And further, with this conception of consciousness, it is 
also manifest that it must possess unity. Were the con- 
. joining operation to be at this point or instant in one light 
of a consciousness, and in a diverse point or instant in an- 
other light of a consciousness, the former manifestation 
would be separate from the latter, and no perpetuated ap- 
pearance of a pure form could be effected. There would be 
a separate revealing for each moment of the constructing 
agency, and in this way only a flashing and extinction of 
light which would be a diverse consciousness for each point 
or instant of space and time, and in this conception, no con- 
tinuity of process nor perpetuity of appearance would be 
possible. The light of consciousness in which the conjunc- 
tion is effected must be throughout in unity or neither the 
construction nor the apprehension can be completed. 

And here, let us go back to our first a priori position in 
the primitive intuition. When we made abstraction of all 



UNITY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 109 

that had been given in the sensibility, and thus left the real 
form of the phenomenon ; and then made abstraction of the 
real form as definite figure or period, and also took away all 
connection of the diverse points and instants, and thus left 
the primitive form of space and time in their limitless and 
unconstructed diversity ; we did not extinguish any light in 
which either the phenomenon, or the real form, or the con- 
nected diversity had appeared. That light still remains and 
gives us the limitless diversity of pure space and time, which 
no abstraction can remove. It is now, it is true, wholly 
subjective, and exists in the primitive intuition only, and so 
far has significancy only for that mind within which the 
primitive intuition is ; but it is there as a light revealing a 
pure diversity, -in which nothing is needed but new con- 
structions to be given, and real forms and phenomenal con- 
tent again appear. This light of the primitive intuition is 
essentially one in its own unity, for* it has the limitless diver- 
sity of space and time beneath it, and all agency that may 
operate to conjoin, and all products that may be conjoined 
in pure space and time, must be illuminated and revealed 
thereby. That original faculty of the primitive intuition, 
which is when all that has been given to it has been taken 
from it — which must d priori have been in order to that ex- 
perience of the phenomenal which was abstracted from it — 
that, essentially, is in the subjective being, as conditional 
for the possibility of apprehending any thing which the pro- 
ductive imagination may construct, or the affection in the 
.sensibility may present, for phenomena. This one illumina- 
tion, which as primitive intuition gives pure space and time, 
as pure intuition gives all real forms constructed, and as 
empirical, intuition gives all that is phenomenal, is the ono 



110 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

constant and perpetual %ht of consciousness revealing all 
that in any way is put within it. And this self-sameness of 
light, in which all that may be constructed must appear, we 
will term — the Unity of consciousness. 

3. There must be more than the unity of the conjoining 
agency and the unity of consciousness. — Were the agency to 
be in unity, and the consciousness also in unity, yet if the 
agency and the consciousness were diverse the product con- 
structed by the intellect could not appear in the conscious- 
ness. The agency might conjoin, but it would be in dark- 
ness ; and the consciousness might stand as a light, but it 
would possess nothing that might appear. The intellect 
would act with its back to the mirror, the mirror would be 
incompetent to envisage for itself the products in the plane 
of its own surface. Both the agency constructing and the 
consciousness revealing must be in unity, and thus what the 
intellect constructs that also the consciousness reveals in the 
same subject. 

And this unity of intellectual action and conscious reveal 
ing is not only necessary as condition that the construction 
and the revelation may be given in one subject, but also 
necessary that there should be any intellectual construction 
at all. The primitive intuition of pure space and time must 
give all diversity in which the conjunction of real forms can 
be effected, and therefore, to the productive imagination, it 
were impossible that any pure object should be attained 
except as constructed in that diversity which is in unity 
with itself, inasmuch as otherwise there can be no pure form 
within which it might construct the real form. The same 
light of an intuition, which gives the diverse points and 
instants in the pure space and time, must also give the con- 



UNITY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. Ill 

structing agency through all its process of conjoining, and 
also give its product as completed pure object. 

And here, this one subject, in which is the unity of both 
constructing agency and revealing consciousness, may be 
termed the self ; and thus this unity of agency and of envis- 
agement will be a unity in the self, and may be termed — the 
Unity of self-consciousness. 

In order to the possibility of a conjunction in unity of 
that which is diverse in the primitive intuition of pure space 
and time, and thus in order to any possible apprehension of 
quantity, the unity of self-consciousness is necessary ; and in 
which is comprehended the unity of the agency, the unity 
of the consciousness, and the unity of both in the same sub- 
ject as a self. It might here be competent, perhaps, to push 
the a priori analysis of conjunction into another department 
higher up, and investigate what are the primitive types con- 
ditioning all constructions of regular forms from the diver- 
sity in the primitive intuition, and what thus would give an 
a priori scheme, as it were, for the regulation of the intel- 
lect, as productive imagination, in constructing its diagrams 
as pure objects in space and time, and thereby the more 
effectually determine what the imagination must be in its 
primitive sources ; but for all the purposes of attaining to 
the sense in its subjective idea in the pure intuition, the 
diversity given in the points and instants of pure space and 
time as wholly unconjoined and limitless, and yet which may 
be conjoined and limited in all possible figures and periods, 
is in itself sufficient ; for it enables us to give an a priori 
examination of the whole process of conjunction, both in 
what is conditional in the result itself as quantity, and in 
the constructing and revealing agency as self-consciousness. 



112 THE SEXSE IK ITS IDEA. 

It should further, as a caution, be here added, that not 
the intellectual agency is self, nor the revealing conscious- 
ness is self, but their unity is in that which we here term 
the self. We are not here in a condition to investigate any 
thing at all relatively to a common subject for the agency 
and the light in which the constructed product appears. 
This belongs wholly to the next part in the faculty of the 
understanding. This much only is it here necessary to 
determine, that for the possibility of all conjunction as giv- 
ing a quantity in space and time, the agency conjoining and 
the consciousness revealing must stand together in unity, 
and which we term the amity of se^-consciousness, though 
we do not here determine any thing about this self, as com- 
mon subject for the imagination and the intuition, the con- 
structing agency and the envisaging consciousness. 

From the progress we have now made, and the position 
to which we have here attained, in the rational cognition of 
self-consciousness, it is competent to answer several queries, 
and settle some important doubtful matters, in reference to 
the process of perception ; and which, except for such an 
a priori investigation, must hereafter be as they have here- 
tofore been, inexplicable mysteries. We will here indicate 
the questions and their solution in a cursory manner. 

Thus, it is quite explicable why the constructed product 
should become an object. — The constructing agency has put 
limits, and thus given definite outline, to what is now a pre- 
cise quantity in pure space and time, 7 and thus space and 
time are no longer void, unconjoined, and limitless, but 
possess a completed form as figure or period, and this 
directly within the intuition as having its unity in a self. 
This definite form is thus thrown face to face, directly 



UNITY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 113 

before the self in its intuition, and is thus an object to the 
apprehension (obvius jaciens). The object, as pure, is in 
the imagination only, and thus wholly subjective and that 
which seems ; but still a real form for any possible content 
that might be given in the sensibility, and when filled by 
such content as its matter, becomes phenomenon as per- 
ceived object, and which then appears. 

And further, it may be manifest how this is my object. 
The constructing agency and the light in which it is revealed 
have their unity in my self, and hence both the conjunction 
and the envisaging are mine ; and as in this process the 
product is given and apprehended as object, it becomes both 
an object to me inasmuch as it is thrown before me, and my 
object inasmuch as it is my construction and my presenta- 
tion. I myself can have no pure object which I do not by 
my productive imagination construct, and which also I do 
not construct in my consciousness ; and both because I my- 
self construct, and I myself envisage, it becomes that I my- 
self have a pure object. 

It is also manifest why pure objects in space and time 
must be wholly incommimicable. — The primitive intuition is 
wholly subjective; the conjoining and the envisaging are 
both also wholly subjective; and thus the pure object is 
object only in my subject. The line I draw r the circle or 
other figure I describe, the period which I limit, become 
pure objects only to me, and can not themselves be communi- 
cated to any other subject. The communication can only 
be by symbols, and inducing that the agency and light in 
unity in a diverse self should construct and reveal similar 
pure objects, in his subjective apprehension.. The possibility 
of the communing in my pure objects by another subject 



114 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

would demand that this diverse subject should be competent 
to envisage the self in which is my imagination and my con- 
sciousness united ; and then, such other self could " search 
my heart, and try my reins." As if two mirrors were self 
conscious, they could only subjectively envisage without the 
possibility of communication among themselves, but the self 
which might envisage them, could well see all that was -in 
them. 

We may further learn why the self can not become object 
to itself. — Only that which may be constructed in the primi- 
tive intuition of pure space and time can become object. 
The agency as process of conjoining may go on within the 
primitive intuition, and the pure product as quantity con- 
structed may also stand out in the consciousness ; but the 
self in which the conjoining agency and revealing conscious- 
ness have their unity must of course lie back of the primi- 
tive intuition, and can not be brought by any construction 
within any of the conjunctions that its diverse points and 
instants may receive. The primitive forms of space and 
time are conditional for all real forms that may be con- 
structed within them, and this can be only of figure and 
period, but the self can not be subjected to such conditions, 
and can not therefore become object. That the self should 
become object would demand that we should see through, 
and not merely that which is m, the envisaging mirror. 

It may also be disclosed, here, how we may come to the 
conviction that a self is, while we can not yet determine at 
all what the self is. — What the self is we can not here at all 
determine, inasmuch as all the intellectual agency which we 
have yet attained is simply that of conjoining in unity and 
constructing the forms for phenomena, while the self can not 



UNITY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 115 

be phenomenon nor be constructed in the shapes of space or 
the successions of time. 

But the conviction that a self is originates fairly in this 
that the unity of constructing agency and revealing con- 
sciousness is conditional for all possible pure objects. Our 
agency, as intellectual, must be in perpetuated unity ; our 
revealings in consciousness, must be in a unity of conscious- 
ness ; and both intellect and consciousness must be in unity; 
and thus a higher subject as self must be, though we are 
not yet prepared to say any thing about it, for a merely con- 
joining agency can do nothing with it. 

Finally, it may be explained in what way ice awake in 
self-conscious?iess. — The spontaneous agency (no matter 
here whether we include the content in the sensibility or not 
for our present purpose as an example) constructs its pro- 
duct in space and time, and this becomes an object in con- 
sciousness. This produced object is distinct from the con- 
structing agency (and more especially so when the matter 
in the sensibility is given), and both it and the process of 
its construction are in the immediate intuition, and thus 
in the light of consciousness they are diverse from each 
other. The agency and the consciousness are referred in 
their unity to one self, which is the unity of self-conscious- 
ness, but the object can not be so referred ; that is other 
than self, a not-self ; and this discrimination between what 
is from self and what is from not-self is the finding of my- 
self In proportion as such discrimination is absent, in 
infancy, in syncope, delirium, somnambulism, or high men- 
tal excitement and passionate absorption, the man has lost 
himself; is beside himself; not self-conscious. 

We have now attained the Idea of the Sense in the pure 



116 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

Intuition. It is hence quite competent to state bow a pure 
sense may be which may give pure objects in a conscious- 
ness. A primitive intuition must have pure space and time 
in its limitless diversity, as primitive form for all possible real 
form which may be given in space and time. An intellec- 
tual agency, as productive imagination, must construct these 
real forms by conjoining the diverse in pure space and time; 
the process to which result must possess the three elements 
of a unity, inducing a plurality, and which is completed in 
a totality / thus giving a definite quantity as product. But 
in order to the possibility for such conjoining agency there 
must be the unity of the agency, the unity of the conscious- 
ness, and the unity of both agency and consciousness in the 
same self, and which is the unity of self-conscious?iess. In 
this way a pure object in space and time may be determined 
as my object. The whole may be concisely expressed in the 
following a priori formula, viz. : All possible pure object 
must be coyijoined by the intellect in the primitive intuition, 
u?ider the unity of self-consciousness. 

All this is an idea of the faculty of the sense as wholly 
pure from all content in the sensibility, and thus wholly 
subjective ; and the pure objects are given incommunicably 
to any other subject than that in which is the agency and 
the consciousness. It remains, in order to the completed 
idea of the sense, that we attain the Idea in the empirical 
Intuition, which will now introduce the Second Division. 



SECOND DIVISION. 

THE IDEA IN THE EMPIRICAL INTUITION, 



SECTION I. 

THE ATTAINMENT OF AN A PRIORI POSITION THROUGH A 
PROLEPSIS. 

All intuition is an immediate beholding. In the primi- 
tive intuition we immediately behold space and time as pure 
diversity. In the pure intuition we immediately behold any 
definite figures or periods constructed in pure space and 
time. When a content in the sensibility gives the matter 
for some phenomenon as quality, and this is brought di- 
rectly within the light of consciousness, this also we imme- 
diately behold ; but inasmuch as this is empirical and not 
pure object ; so the distinction is made for it by calling it 
empirical intuition. In all perception of objects in the 
sense this content in the sensibility is given, and as the qual- 
ity of the phenomenon, its a priori investigation is as neces- 
sary to a complete idea of the sense as the process of its 
construction into form. This, therefore, is the design of the 
present Division, to attain the subjective Idea of the Sense 
in the empirical Intuition. 



118 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

The first requisition is that we attain a determinate tran- 
scendental position from which an a priori examination may- 
be had, and in which all our conclusions shall carry with 
them the demonstrations of universality and necessity. 
We should wholly fail of attaining such a position through 
a process of abstraction, as before for the primitive intuition 
of space and time. An abstraction of all content from the 
sensibility would be a void of all matter for phenomena, and 
thus the nihility of all empirical intuition. An empty or- 
ganism of sense gives no condition for any intellectual ope- 
ration, as does the pure diversity of space and time in the 
primitive intuition for the construction of pure figure and 
period. We are then forced to some other method of at- 
taining a position back of all experience, from whence to 
attain those conditional principles which make the experi- 
ence of perceived phenomena possible. 

That there should be some content in the sensibility in 
order to sensation, and thus a condition given for empirical 
intuition, is at once seen to be a universal necessity. An 
anticipation of such content in general, as condition for any 
and all perception of phenomena, and in the conception of 
which an occasion may be given for determining what 
intellectual operation is necessary universally for bringing 
such anticipated content under an empirical intuition, will 
give to us our determined a priori position. Such a gen- 
eral anticipation of content in the sensibility, as conditional 
for all possible empirical intuition, will put us at once above 
all experience in the sense, and give to us an occasion for 
investigating the whole ground of possibility for bringing 
such content within the light of consciousness and thereby 
making it to be a perceived definite phenomenon. We 



A PEIOKI POSITION BY.A PEOLEPSIS. 119 

shall in this be restricted to no partial organism of the sen- 
sibility, but whether there be five or fifty sources of or- 
ganic sensation, and each of these organs be competent to 
receive content of a thousand- fold variety, still the same 
conditional principles for bringing any and all under an em- 
pirical intuition must be universally necessary. We start 
from this general anticipation of content, and in it deter- 
mine what is universally necessary that it may be possible 
to appear as phenomenon in consciousness, and in this we 
attain an a priori subjective idea of the entire process of 
empirical intuition. The position is attained not by an 
abstraction but by an anticipation. Such an anticipation 
was by the old Greek philosophers termed a Prolepsis 
(npoXniptg), and we here use it as inclusive of mere content 
in general for all possible phenomena. 

It will be necessary to determine how it is possible to 
bring this content in general into qualities distinct one from 
another, and also how to order this distinct quality into defi- 
nite forms, so that one phenomenon may be both distinct in 
quality from all others, and definite in its own form, as 
appearing in the consciousness. We shall thus have the 
conditions of two separate processes of an intellectual 
agency to investigate, viz., that of distinguishing the con- 
tent, and that of constructing the distinguished quality into 
a definite form. We shall in this have the subjective Idea 
of all perception of phenomena, both as distinct in quality 
and definite in form ; and this is inclusive of the entire intel- 
lectual operation which is conditional for all possibility of 
complete empirical intuition, or, as the same thing, clear 
perception of phenomena in the sense. The idea of the 
operation of conjunction has already been attained in the 



120 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

bringing of pure space and time into definite figure and 
period, and it remains, here, that we investigate the primi- 
tive elements of the operation of distinction; and then 
that we show how the primitive elements of conjunction, 
already attained in pure intuition, apply also to empirical 
intuition, or the perceiving of phenomena. 



SECTION II 



THE PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF ALL POSSIBLE ANTICIPATION 
OP APPEARANCE IN THE SENSE. 

Sensibility is the capacity of being affected by the pres- 
ence of some content which is from somewhere given to it. 
The affection is a sensation, and answers to the content by 
which it has been induced. It may thus be manifold in its 
diversity according to the diversity in all possible content 
which may affect the sensibility. As many diverse organs 
as may be given for the functions of the sense, so great must 
be the possible diversity of the kinds of content that may 
be received ; and as diverse as the impressions given induc- 
ing in each organ its diversity of affection, so much may be 
the possible diversity of the varieties of content that may 
be received. Thus, the eye as organ, may receive one kind 
of content, and the ear as diverse organ another kind, etc., 
and thus the kinds be diversified through all possible organs. 
The eye again may receive its content of all possible diver- 
sities, inducing all possible diversity in its sensation, and the 
ear and all other possible organs in the same manner, and 
thus there may be a diversity of varieties in the sensation 



PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF DISTINCTION. 121 

through all possible content. The diverse organs will give 
diverse kinds, and the diverse affections in the same organ, 
and this through all possible organs, will give the diverse 
varieties possible. All possible diversity of sensation may 
thus be given in an anticipation of all possible content in the 
sense. 

The prolepsis in the sense is that of a universal anticipa- 
tion of content in all possible kinds and varieties ; inclusive 
not only of that which conditions our human perception, 
but of all possible perception of phenomena in any sense. 
And of this universal prolepsis of content we now deter- 
mine that it may have all possible diversity of kind and 
variety, and thus be wholly undiscriminated and undistin- 
guished. The sensibility may give all possible diversity of 
content in all the kinds and varieties of sensation, but the 
sensation completed is all that the functions of the organic 
sensibility can accomplish. The sensibility distinguishes 
nothing, but only gives content in its diversity which must 
be distinguished by an intellectual agency. Were there no 
other functions than those in the sensibility, nothing could 
be determined in its own distinct appearance, but all must 
remain in the chaotic confusion of undiscriminated diverse 
sensation. An intellectual agency must first brood over the 
chaos, or no one kind or variety can come out in its distinct- 
ness in the consciousness. An agency is demanded which 
may distinguish amid the kinds and varieties in the sensation. 
The intellectual* agency in distinguishing must perform a 
different work from that already examined in constructing, 
and this process of distinguishing needs now to be as care- 
fully investigated as has before been effected for the process 
of constructing definite forms in pure space and time. In 



122 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

construction, the work performed was that of a conjoining 
in unity ; in distinction, the work performed is a discrimin- 
ating in an individuality. The one attains forms in conjunc- 
tion, the other attains appearances in distinction ; one pro- 
duces its object by collecting the diversity into it, the other 
finds its object by excluding all diversity from it. This 
Operation of Distinction is that which we now proceed 
to examine, that we may attain all the primitive elements 
which must be found within it. 

1. Our universal anticipation is inclusive of all possible 
content in a sensibility, whether of an outer or an inner 
sense, and of all possible kinds and varieties ; and as thus 
wholly undiscriminated, it demands that what is to be a 
precise appearance in the consciousness, should be com- 
pletely distinguished in its sensation from all others. Con- 
tent must first be given to the sensibility, and by discrimin- 
ating and excluding all diversity from it, that content is 
found in its, own distinct phenomenal quality in the con- 
sciousness. A void sensibility can offer nothing to be dis- 
tinguished, and the sensibility has itself no function for pro- 
ducing content within itself, and thus from somewhere other 
than itself must the content come. The intellectual agency 
as distinguishing operation has first to be supplied with a 
sensation, which must be induced by some content affecting 
the sensibility ; and the apprehending of this involves a dis- 
criminating it from non-sensation, and thus a determining 
that the sensibility is not void. The distinction here is 
between content and a void, sensation and non-sensation; 
and this intellectual taking up of some content is henceforth 
in the process an exclusion of all non-content from the 
apprehending agency, and the determination that some of 



PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF DISTINCTION. 123 

all possible diversity of sensation appears in the conscious- 
ness. There is something as opposed to nothing which 
appears, and in this distinction of appearance from non- 
appearance in the consciousness is first attained the concep- 
tion of a phenomenal reality. Some matter now stands in 
the consciousness, which has been found by the agency that 
discriminates sensation from non-sensation ; and this is the 
first element in the operation of distinction, viz., Reality. 

2. It must be manifest that a completed work of dis- 
tinction is not given in this, that some content as opposed 
to fton-sensation appears. It may be any one of all possible 
realities in appearance, and in order to its precise determin- 
ation in the consciousness, it must be competent to deny of 
this that which may be in all other appearances beside this. 
That it is real appearance is a determined distinction from 
non-appearance only, and it needs further to be determined 
as distinction from all other possible appearances. The 
intellectual agency niust, therefore, proceed in its distin- 
guishing work, and exclude from this appearance all other 
possible appearances, and thus affirm for it the absence of 
all other reality than that which is its own. To effect such 
further distinction, all other diversity must be cut off from 
this reality, and stand over against this as other than, and 
the contrary of, this. All other realities excluded from this 
determines their distinction from this, and thereby particu- 
larizes this in the discrimination of all others apart from 
this. This denying of that which is in any other possible 
reality to be in this present apprehended reality excludes all 
other reality, and makes this a discriminated particular. 
We have, therefore, in this further process of distinction, 



124 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

added to the element of reality, this second element of Par- 
ticularity. 

3. That we have distinguished the real from the non- 
real, and also the particular from the universal, has not yet 
completed the work of distinction. We may be able to 
affirm of any real appearance that it is not any other appear- 
ance, and this will be but negative determination. To say 
of some appearance, this is not color, nor sound, nor taste, 
etc., and in reference to variety, this is not redness, nor 
greenness, nor whiteness, etc., and so also of the internal 
phenomena, this is not thought, nor volition, nor grief,tnor 
joy, etc., and to carry this discrimination so far as to deny 
all other and thus particularize this, would still only be to 
affirm what it is not. It discriminates and thus determines 
negatively, but finds nothing positively. It is preparatory 
to a completed distinction, but is not the consummation of 
the work. The distinguishing agency must now advance 
to an individualizing of this particular reality in its own 
appearance. It must affirm more than what it is not, even 
what it is ; more than what is excluded from it, even that 
which is included in it. That must positively be found in it 
which is not in any other reality, and thus it must separate 
itself positively, and not merely negatively from all reality 
but itself, that it may appear in consciousness having its 
own peculiar phenomenal variety. This will add to the ele- 
ments of reality and particularity, the third element of 
Peculiarity. 

It is, moreover, a priori manifest, that not only must all 
complete distinction include the elements of reality, particu- 
larity, and peculiarity, inasmuch as nothing can be distinctly 
apprehended except as a reality which is particular from all 



PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF DISTINCTION. 125 

others and peculiar in itself; but that also no operation of 
distinction can have more than these three elements, for 
when the appearance is apprehended in its reality, particu- 
larity and peculiarity it is completely discriminated, and 
no work of distinguishing can be carried forward any fur- 
ther. The operation of distinction is always complete in 
this, that it finds a reality, particularized from all others, 
and peculiar in itself, and thus a precise appearance is given 
in the consciousness. This operation of distinction, as an 
intellectual work bringing the diverse sensation into a pre- 
cise appearance in consciousness, may properly be termed 
Observation. The completed result as precise appearance 
in consciousness is Quality. All sensation as distinguished 
in a complete observation becomes quality, and may be of 
different kinds ; as colors, weights, sounds, etc., and also of 
different varieties ; as red, green, yellow, etc., and also differ 
as inner appearance; as thought, feeling, volition, etc. 
All quality is educed from sensation, the sensation being 
taken up by the intellectual agency, and in its distinguishing 
operation found thereby to be a reality, particularized from 
all others, and peculiar in its own phenomenal being. 

We have, in the attainment of these primitive elements 
of distinction, kept the result of the process in view rather 
than the process itself, and have thus noted what has been 
found by it in the universal content anticipated, as before 
in the constructing process of conjunction what was pro- 
duced by it in pure space and time ; and we attain thus, not 
merely what our subjective faculty of judgment may accom- 
plish, but what must be effected by all possible faculties in 
order to the precise discrimination of any quality in the 
consciousness. All possible distinguishable quality must 



126 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

possess reality, particularity, and peculiarity. The opera- 
tion of Distinction in all possible sensation must find these 
primitive elements, so many and no more. 

It must also be here noted that some things are condi- 
tional in order that a distinguishing agency may be, as we 
before found conditions for the possibility of a conjoining 
agency. We need here merely to notice them cursorily, as 
what was given above more fully will be mainly applicable 
to the agency discriminating as well as the agency con- 
structing. There must be the Unity of discriminating 
agency, or the diversity in sensation could not be distin- 
guished, inasmuch as what was taken up at one apprehen- 
sion would else be lost at another. There must be a Unity 
of the sensibility also, or one kind of sensation would be- 
long to one subject, and another kind to another. And 
both distinguishing agency, and sensibility must be in Unity 
of consciousness, or the content to be discriminated could 
not be put in the same consciousness as the distinguishing 
operation. And, lastly, all must be in the higher Unity of 
the same subject, that both the sensation, the distinction <, 
and the consciousness, may belong to the same self, and 
thus what the self has in sensation, the same self distin- 
guishes, and the consciousness in which all appear is also in 
the same self; and which may be termed as before the 
Unity of self -consciousness. 

We may thus affirm, as an a priori cognition, that all 
possible quality must be discriminated in the elements of 
all Distinction, viz., reality, particularity, and peculiarity. 
This would give the idea of the sense in its content for a 
phenomenon, as an anticipation of all possible content in 
sensation ; but thus far the matter is only distinguished, not 



A PRIORI DIVERSITY IN QUALITY. 127 

conjoined into form, which last must be effected in order 
that it may come within an empirical intuition ; we will then 
now attain the process for a priori giving form to the con- 
tent as distinguished, and thus complete the Idea in the 
empirical Intuition. 



SECTION III 



THE A PRIORI DETERMINATION OF WHAT DIVERSITY THERE 
MUST BE IN ALL QUALITY. 

Void sensibility can possess no sensation. It is no mat- 
ter of consideration here whether the sensibility be itself 
more or less sensitive. There may, doubtless, be a readi- 
ness to become affected, in different sensibilities, through 
widely different degrees. It may be that in us men, there 
is far less capability of being affected by a content in our 
sensibility, than would be in beings whose perfection of sen- 
sibility was the highest possible. Perhaps an organ of sense 
sufficiently perfected might be so affected by the content 
given in magnetic or electric influences, or in chemical elec 
tive affinities, or even in the light itself, that it should give 
to the discriminating agency of the intellect sensations 
which might be precisely distinguished, and thereby unrid- 
dle all those mysteries which are now mere hypothesis and 
theory, and make them to be plain facts in perception. Nor 
is it of any moment here to determine how comprehensive a 
sensibility may possibly be. It may be conceived that new 
organs of sense should be indefinitely added to our five or 
six, and that the field of perception should thus be indefin- 



128 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

itely augmented. But whether the sensibility be more or 
less perfect in sensitiveness, or more or less comprehensive 
in varied organs for receiving content for sensation, this is 
universally true, that all sensibility of all possible perfection 
and compass must have its content from somewhere given 
to it, in order that any affection as sensation should be given 
in it. No quality can appear, except as its content to be 
distinguished has somehow been given in a sensibility. 

And now, all quality as thus anticipated may admit of a 
diversity in two different directions of consideration. The 
content in the sensibility inducing sensation may be diverse. 
It may be given through different organs of sense, and thus 
be diverse in hind y it may give different sensations in the 
same organ, and thus be diverse in variety. Colors, sounds, 
smells, thoughts, feelings, etc., are all diverse in hind: and 
thus with all possible organs and faculties of an outward or 
inward sensibility. lied and blue ; bitter and sweet ; warm 
and smooth ; joy, grief, hope ; conception, recollection, etc., 
etc., are all diverse in variety / and thus through all the 
difference of sensation that may be given within the same 
organs and faculties of an external or internal sense. In all 
this diversity as appearing in the content, there is difference 
as contrariety in the reality itself, and the diverse may 
therefore be termed that of the heterogeneous. This diver- 
sity as heterogeneous in quality has already been sufficiently 
explained in the consideration of the operation of Distinc- 
tion in its primary elements. All such diversity possible is 
ordered in the appearance through a process of distinguish- 
ing in an intellectual agency. All possible diversity of 
quality, which may be made to appear in consciousness, and 
which is heterogeneous in itself, must be determined in an 



A PRIORI DIVERSITY IN QUALITY. ] 29 

operation of Distinction. Sufficient attention has, therefore, 
already been given to the process for determining all possi- 
ble diversity which is heterogeneous. 

But in another point of consideration, the quality has a 
diversity in another manner. All the redness, or the cold- 
ness, or the grief, which is given as appearance from the 
same separate sensation, has in itself no contrariety but has 
similarity throughout. And yet there is diversity, for the 
redness of one place is diverse from the redness in another, 
and the coldness of one period is diverse from the coldness 
of another, and the grief rises or diminishes in diverse 
degrees ; and thus in all, there is diversity which involves 
no contrariety of the reality itself, but which possesses simi- 
larity thoroughly. This diversity, then, may be termed the 
homogeneous. And as this has not at all, as yet, been con- 
sidered, and as in the ordering of this diversity homogene- 
ous in the appearance will be found all that belongs to the 
form, and in this also all that can come into an empirical 
intuition, and therefore all that may be embraced in the idea 
of the sense as in the empirical intuition, it becomes neces- 
sary clearly to apprehend this homogeneous diversity, and 
the whole process of its becoming an ordered form for the 
content given in the sensation. The object in this section is, 
to determine this universal possible diversity of quality. 

1. Of all possible quality which may be determined from 
anticipation of content in the sensibility, a distinction must 
be made between it as a reality, and a void sensibility which 
can give no reality. We may, therefore, take any reality as 
quality, and while homogeneous in itself, it may vary in 
amount indefinitely. The intellectual distinction from the 
non-real to the real has simply the limit r as zero, between 

G* 



130 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

them. On one side is the negative of all appearance and 
reality ; on the other is a precisely discriminated appearance 
and reality ; and this, it is manifest, may vary in amount 
from the least possible degree of that reality which can 
appear, up to the highest possible which can be given in an 
appearance. This difference of degree possible is a diver- 
sity in the anticipation, and includes all possible diversity 
of that reality ; and as it is a diversity throughout in the 
same reality, it has similarity and not contrariety. It is 
thus a homogeneous diversity. And inasmuch as the amount 
is determined from the given sensation as degree of affec- 
tion in the sensibility, it is a homogeneous diversity which 
should be characterized by a term expressive of its genesis. 
The amount of the pressure as heaviness, or of the color as 
brightness, is as the intensity of affection in the sensibility ; 
the intensity of the sensation giving the amount in appear- 
ance, and thus having a homogeneous diversity from the 
point of no sensation up to the given sensation. We may, 
then, as characteristic of this homogeneous diversity, term 
it a diversity as Intensive. 

2. Though as reality, the quality may have a homogene- 
ous diversity only as intensive, and thus through all its 
amount, yet in another point of view a homogeneous diver- 
sity is in another manner given. The quality, as that of an 
external sense may occupy more or less of space. The con- 
tent given in sensation thus considered stands in space as 
the homogeneous through all the place it occupies, and it 
becomes thus a diversity in the empirical intuition precisely 
as pure space is a diversity in the primitive intuition. The 
reality is homogeneous in the same place that the pure space 
is homogeneous, and thus has a diversity of itself in every 



A PEIOEI DIVERSITY IN QUALITY. 131 

point of space in that place. Quality, thus, may be homo- 
geneously diverse in place; and as characteristic of this 
specific diversity, as it fills more or less extended place, we 
will term it diversity as Extensive. 

3. Quality may have diversity intensive and extensive, 
not only, but also in another manner there may be homo- 
geneity through a diversity. The reality as appearance is 
given during the continuance of the sensation. So long as 
the content in the sensibility affects this sensibility in the 
same manner, the sensation is similar and homogeneous 
throughout, and thus the homogeneous reality occupies the 
same succession of instants in pure time for the empirical 
intuition, that the pure period does in the pure intuition. 
As the instants in the pure period are homogeneous and 
diverse, so the reality occupying this period is throughout 
homogeneous, and in each instant diverse. The reality is 
homogeneous in the same period that the pure time is homo- 
geneous, and thus has a diversity of itself in every instant 
of the time it fills. Quality may thus be homogeneously 
diverse in time ; and as descriptive of this manner of homo- 
geneous diversity we may term it the Protensive. 

Now an intellectual agency must distinguish the hetero- 
geneous, and conjoin the homogeneous diversity. And 
this conjunction of the homogeneous will give form to that 
matter, which has been distinguished in the heterogeneous 
diversity. 



132 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 



SECTION IV. 

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE HOMOGENEOUS DIVERSITY OF 
ALL POSSIBLE QUALITY INTO FORM. 

There are two main questions which may be asked con- 
cerning any anticipated content in sensation, and which must 
be answered as conditional for all distinct and definite 
appearance in consciousness. The first is — What is the 
quality ? The process for arriving at an answer to this, has 
already been indicated. It must be through the oper- 
ation of Distinction. The intellect as discriminating agent 
must take up the sensation and determine it in its reality, 
particularity, and peculiarity ; and such agency places it in 
its own precise distinctness of quality immediately in the 
light of consciousness, and capacitates us to say directly 
what it is. Thus far it is properly observation, and ^his 
determining of quality in its distinctness is all that observa- 
tion can accomplish. 

A second question is — How much is the quality ? The 
process to the attainment of an answer here is by a different 
operation than that of distinction altogether. The quality 
is contemplated as having quantity, and the intellectual 
agency is to be employed in determining how much quantity. 
And now, in our first Division in this Chapter, we attained 
the a priori process for the production of all pure quantity 
through a conjunction in unity, the application of which to 
the distinct quality must be our only method for determin- 
ing how much it is. All quantity has its quality, and all 
quality has a quantity. The only quality which any quantity 



CONJUNCTION OF QUALITY INTO FORM. 133 

may have is, that it is extended ; and, as all extension is 
determined only by a conjoining agency, so both the quan- 
tity and its quality are given in the same constructing oper- 
ation. A conjoining act gives both a quantity and also that 
the quantity has extension. There is, therefore, in the deter- 
mination of quantity no operation of distinction demanded, 
for its precise quality is given in giving itself. There is 
nothing to be discriminated in extension itself as a quality, 
but only that it be determined whether the extension be 
pure or empirical. 

But not thus with the quality. The agency which dis- 
criminates this, and thus gives it precisely and distinctly in 
the consciousness, has not accomplished the whole work 
demanded. The operation of distinction has given quality 
only, and quality has quantity which no distinguishing 
agency can determine. In addition to the operation of dis- 
tinction there must also be the operation of conjunction. 
While, therefore, we could finish our work in the construc- 
tion of quantity by one operation of conjunction, in relation 
to quality we must apply both operations. To find the pre- 
cise quality, what it is, we must distinguish ; and then, to 
find how much it is, we must conjoin. The distinguishing 
process has been already given ; we have here to apply the 
conjoining process. This will demand a constructing pro- 
cess in a three-fold order of operation, inasmuch as the 
homogeneous diversity to be constructed is three-fold. The 
question, How much is the quality ? may mean, How much 
as Intensive, as Extensive, or as Protensivef i. e., how 
much in the sensation ? how much in space ? and how much 
in time ? Only in the answers to these three inquiries, do 
we exhaust the quantity which is to be found in all quality. 



134 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

The operation in distinction we have said to be Observation; 
we shall now find the operation in conjunction to be Atten- 
tion. Attention not only extends the intellect to the con- 
tent in sensation, but includes the operation then performed 
in constructing it, and which puts the form of the content 
in clear consciousness. The applying of the intellect to the 
content in sensation may be by an act of the will, or it may 
be spontaneous, as must have been the first agency in child- 
hood, and as often is in adult life. But the attending act 
(ad tendo) is the intellect stretching or extending over, and 
thus circumscribing or constructing the content in its com- 
plete form; and this is none other than the operation of 
conjunction in unity. 

In pure space and time the definite form as quantity is 
to be constructed by an intellectual agency in its sponta- 
neity, moving over the diversity in its manifoldness and con- 
joining it in unity. The same work must also be effected 
for the content in sensation through its three-fold diversity 
as intensive, extensive, and protensive. The difference is 
only in this, that the pure diagrams in space and time must 
be constructed according to some scheme in the productive 
imagination; but the empirical forms must be constructed 
according to the content as given in the sensation ; the work 
of construction is precisely the same in both — the conjunc- 
tion of the diversity in a unity, plurality, and totality — 
and thereby giving completeness to the quantity of the qual" 
ity already distinguished. The act of observation is thus to 
give distinctness to quality ; and the act of attention is to 
give definiteness to quantity : in observing, we distinguish 
it from all other quality ; in attending, we limit it in its own 
quantity : in the first, we get the distinct quality of the 



CONJUNCTION OF QUALITY INTO FOEM.135 

phenomenon ; in the last we get the definite form of the 
phenomenon. We will now at once give the latter process 
in its three-fold application to the homogeneous diversity. 

1. The diversity as intensive is given wholly within the 
sensibility, and is the manifoldness of degree from no sensa- 
tion upward to the intensity of any given sensation. In 
order to attain the form of the quality as to how much in 
amount, this diversity in the sensation must be conjoined 
in unity into one total quantity. The intellect, as construct- 
ing agency, must commence from zero in the sensation, and 
conjoin the diverse degrees of intensity through all their 
multiplicity up to and terminating in the degree that limits 
the intensity of the given sensation, and such completed 
product is the quantity, or form in intensity, of that given 
quality. Such construction, as attending agency, brings the 
quantity of the intensity into immediate consciousness, and 
we perceive how much in amount the quality is. 

Thus, I have the sensation of a pressure, and by obser- 
vation I distinguish the sensation as heaviness. By atten- 
tion I go over and conjoin the diversity from no heaviness 
up to the intensity of pressure as given in sensation, and I 
perceive there is so much weight. 

So also, I have a sensation which in distinction I ob- 
serve to be sound, and in further discrimination I observe 
that there is a great variety of sounds, and this is the ut- 
most which any distinguishing agency can here accomplish. 
But I attend to these various sounds, and thus construct 
their quantity, and I at once perceive their various degrees 
of intensity, and can now discriminate by other faculties, 
which need not here be noticed, what is going on in these 



136 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

sounds and binding them in unison as a definite harmony 
into their tune. 

So, with an anticipated content in the organ of vision 
inducing sensation, I discriminate and observe light ; and at 
different times distinguish the peculiarities of sunlight from 
moonshine. Here is the completion of what appears from 
observation. But I attend in a constructing agency and 
conjoin the degrees of intensity in the sunlight, and again 
in the moon-light, and I thus perceive how much light in 
both separately, and can now determine that it requires so 
many thousand times the intensity of the moonlight to 
equal the intensity of the sunlight. 

Thus of any inward sensation ; I distinguish, and ob- 
serve myself to be grieved ; I construct the degrees of in- 
tensity in attention, and determine the amount of my grief. 

Thus in all diversity as intensive, the operation of dis- 
tinction can give only the quality in its peculiarity ; the ope- 
ration of conjunction must be conditional for bringing the 
amount of the quality into consciousness. Except as this 
conjoining agency goes through the entire diversity of the 
sensation, it is impossible that the quantity of the quality 
should be perceived. 

2. The diversity as extensive is the manifoldness of the 
points in the content of sensation, as occupying so much 
space. The precise quality having been discriminated, the 
question is, not how much as intensive, but how great as 
extensive ? The matter having been determined in distinct 
observation, the form must be determined in definite atten- 
tion. A conjoining agency must pass over these diverse 
points and bring them in unity in the same manner as be- 
fore shown in pure space, with this difference only, that in 



CONJUNCTION OF QUALITY INTO FORM. 137 

pure space the constructing agency is guided in its work by- 
some scheme in the imagination, but in the anticipated con- 
tent it must be conditioned by the sensation. This con- 
struction completed, determines the form of the quality as 
figure in space. 

Thus I anticipate a given sensation in a resistance to 
touch, which as precisely distinguished I term the quality of 
solidity. Without determining the form as intensity, i. e., 
how hard it is ; I only seek the form as extension, how large 
it is. I must pass my organ of touch over the matter and 
bring it successively in the sensation, and the attending 
agency must construct the whole by joining the diverse 
points in unity and thereby give definite limits to this solid- 
ity ; and then affirm the quality to be of such a figure, and 
to fill so much of space. The matter has thus a definite 
form, as so great extension. 

So again, with an anticipated content in the eye, as organ 
of the sensibility, which in distinguishing I term color ; and 
in further observation I attain the varieties of the color, say 
now specifically green and white. I must now apply a con- 
structing agency, and in attention I conjoin the greenness 
into figure, and determine the magnitude and outlines of a 
verdant court-yard ; and I conjoin also the whiteness, and 
determine the size and proportions of the dwelling-house, 
and its position relatively to the outlines of the yard in 
which it stands. I have thus brought the matter, as quality 
in sensation, into definite form. 

Thus with all quality that can have extension. Distinc- 
tion gives the quality, conjunction determines how great a 
space it occupies ; nor can the form as extensive otherwise 
be determined. Without observation the consciousness 



138 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

would be " void," and without attention the quality in con- 
sciousness would be " without form." Sensation may be 
perfected, but it is utter chaos except as an intelligent spirit, 
in its distinguishing and conjoining agency, broods over it. 

3. The diversity as protensive is in the manifoldness of 
the successive instants through which the appearance as 
quality is prolonged. Of any distinct quality, we may 
enquire, not merely, how much ? as intensive ; nor how 
great ? as extensive ; but also, how long ? as protensive it 
endures. And for the determination of this, the same pro- 
cess of conjunction in an attending agency is necessary as in 
the construction of period in pure time, except that the con- 
joining agency is conditioned to the sensation in its begin- 
ning and determination, and not to any scheme of the imagi- 
nation. 

Thus an anticipated sensation in the ear, as organ of the 
sensibility, may be taken and distinguished as sound. I do 
not now enquire how loud, nor how distant it may be, but 
only how long does it continue ? I attend to the passing 
affection of my inner state, and conjoin the instants from 
the beginning to the termination, or to any given instant in 
the prolongation of the sensation, and thus determine the 
period which the sound occupies ; and thereby affirm that it 
has endured so long. And in the same way, for the form of 
all possible quality for duration in time; my attending 
agency must conjoin the diversity, and thereby construct 
the definite period. 

And now, in these three diversities, as the manifoldness 
of degree, of extent, and of duration, all possible quantity 
which any quality may possess may be constructed, and 
thus all possible form be determined for all matter. Inten- 



CONJUNCTION OF QUALITY INTO FORM. 139 

sity in the sensibility, extension in space, and prolongation 
in time include all possible mensurations of quantity. If we 
would term motion and force to be qualities, their determin- 
ation will be included in the above methods of conjoining in 
unity ; for the motion must be measured as so much exten- 
sion occupying so much time in passing, and the force as so 
much intensity of resistance or so much motion produced ; 
all of which have their diversities as above, and may as 
above be all conjoined and made to appear in an attending 
agency. There can be no other possible quantities in any 
quality, and the form as giving definiteness to the matter 
can not be determined in any other possible manner. We 
may thus give the a priori condition for constructing all 
possible quality into form, viz. : that the intellect in atten- 
tion must conjoin the diversity as conditioned by the sensa- 
tion, — whether as intensive, extensive, or protensive — in 
unity, plurality, and totality. The concise form of express- 
ing it is — that the attention must produce the form in all 
possible quality. 

There are a few a priori cognitions involved in what has 
been here attained, which it may be of importance to notice 
in this place. 

1. Inasmuch as all constructions of form must take place 
singly, and thus no two forms can be in process of construc- 
tion together, it follows that an accurate and exact compar- 
ative mensuration of quantity can not be effected in atten- 
tion simply. In pure space I may construct two circles, and 
in sensation I may have the matter for two rings which I 
construct into form, but I can not exactly compare the two 
constructing operations together in either case, and say that 
the two circles or the two rings are of precisely the same 



140 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

quantity. In the above cases I may come near to exactnesSj 
though precisely how near I can not determine, for I have 
no capability of constructing the diversity which their dif- 
ference in quantity contains. In many other cases, the 
degrees of exactness may be necessarily much wider apart, 
especially when the contents must be given in different 
senses, or in the same organ at different times. Thus with 
the precise difference in the extension of a quantity as seen 
and as in the touch, or of the degrees of heat or of weight 
at two different experiences, their comparative quantity 
must be still less accurately given in attention simply. If I 
know that the circles, as above, have been constructed by 
the circumvolution of two lines of the same extent, the 
judgment at once decides that they must be equal ; but a 
difficulty would here again occur, how shall any attending 
agency simply be competent to determine the exact equality 
of the two lines ? But, if now I may bring the forms in 
both cases to one common standard, I may then determine 
their equality, or the difference between them exactly. Thus 
if I may apply the same material line as diameter to the 
two rings successively, or the same index to the two experi- 
ences of heat ; their comparison in this common application 
may determine their equality, or amount of inequality. We 
may thus a priori see the necessity for empirical standards 
of mensuration, and the principles on which we must move 
to attain them. Their exactness can be made an approxim- 
ation to the perfection of an intuition, by so much as the 
mechanical execution and practical application of the com- 
mon measure can be perfect. It is easy to see how the 
experiment, if not intuitively perfect, may yet be far more 
nearly exact than any construction in attention simply. 



CONJUNCTION OF QUALITY INTO FORM. 141 

Thus for the various degrees of intensity in different senses 
organically, we have photometers, thermometers, barome- 
ters, balances, etc. ; and for extension in space, rods or 
chains to determine length, with gallons, bushels and gaug- 
ing rods to determine capacity ; and for duration in time 
the various chronometers, as dials, hour-glasses, clocks, 
watches, etc. In no one of these diversities in quantity can 
any mensuration be absolute, but only as a reference com- 
parative with some common standard. 

2. It is a priori manifest that all quantity may be divisi- 
ble beyond any possible experience, both in amount, extent, 
and duration. The intensity may be any amount of all pos- 
sible degrees at any place and in any time. A given amount 
of light, or of heat, may thus be diminished in the same 
place to any assignable degree, and yet the space hi extent 
be still a plenum ; nor can this be so far carried in any 
experiment, that it may not be conceived as yet possible to 
go further in the exhaustion, without at all inducing a 
vacuum in any portion of the space. And as in amount, so 
also in extent ; the diversity in the quality is as the diver- 
sity in space, and hence no given diminution may be, which 
is not also capable of a further diminution. And the same 
again in duration ; the diversity in the duration of the 
quality is as the diversity in time, and hence no given con- 
traction of a period can be, which may not also be still fur- 
ther contracted. The process of divisibility, thus, in all 
quantity, is truly infinite. It can not be carried out to a 
limit which has not yet a limit beyond. 

3. While the heterogeneous diversity may come within 
the operation of distinction, it is only the homogeneous 
diversity that may come within the operation of conjunc 



142 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

tion. The heterogeneous in kind must be a content for the 
sensibility in different organs, and the constructing agency- 
can not thus conjoin the diverse kinds in 'unity. A sound 
and an odor can not be conjoined in unity so as to give a 
total, nor either of these with a color. And the heterogene- 
ous in variety must be at different times or in different 
places in the same organ, and therefore incompetent to be 
conjoined in unity. A distinct bitter and sweet taste, frag- 
rant and fetid odor, or a red and blue color, can not be con- 
joined in unity. The place or period which both occupy 
may be conjoined, or there may be a blending of the hetero- 
geneous, as in the rainbow ; and the whole, as undistin- 
guished quality, constructed into form. So also, and for 
similar reasons, the different orders of homogeneous diver- 
sity can not be constructed in unity. The degrees of inten- 
sity may not be conjoined in one form with the points in 
space, nor with the instants in time; though the same 
quality may separately admit of a conjunction, in all the 
orders of homogeneous diversity. A redness or a hardness 
may have degrees of intensity, figure in extension, and dur- 
ation in time ; but all these must be constructed in separate 
acts of attention. 



OTHER REPRESENTATIONS OP THE SENSE. 143 



SECTION V. 

THE CONCLUSIVE DETERMINATION OP THE SENSE IN ITS 
SUBJECTIVE IDEA. 

From an a priori position we have now passed in 
review the whole field of the sense in its ideal possibility. 
The operation of Conjunction for the construction of pure 
figure and period in space and time has been completely 
expounded, and all definite forms which may occupy space 
and time determined as possible. Other forms for phenom- 
ena, than such as may be constructed in space and time, can 
not be; nor can these be constructed otherwise than 
through the process of conj miction in unity, plurality, and 
totality. By an a priori anticipation of content in general 
for the sensibility, the operation of Distinction, for the pre- 
cise quality of any phenomenon which can be given through 
sensation, has also been fully exposed, and thereby the pos- 
sibility of all distinct qualities determined. There can not 
be other content for phenomena than that given in sensation, 
and this can not otherwise be discriminated than through 
the process of distinction in reality, particularity, and pecu- 
liarity. By attaining all the a priori orders of a homogene- 
ous diversity of which quality is capable, as the intensive, 
the extensive, and the protensive, and the operation of con- 
junction in its applicability to them all, we have, moreover, 
determined the possibility of ordering sensation in all the 
forms which the matter for phenomena may assume. Q^ Uc > v 
can have no forms but those of quantity, and these caiP^fy. 
only of amount, extent, and duration ; nor can these * j 



144 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

otherwise constructed than through the process of conjunc- 
tion, as before determined in the pure intuition. 

In these several a priori conclusions is involved the 
complete idea of all perception of phenomena in its possi- 
bility. An empirical intuition is thus possible. Phenomena 
may be given, as appearance distinct and definite in con- 
sciousness, in this manner. A Faculty of Sense may so be, 
and perceive objects. And if objects are given in space 
and time, as appearance in consciousness, it must be through 
this same process now a priori determined. The compre- 
hensive formula for expressing the Sense in its complete sub- 
jective Idea, may in conclusion stand thus — Sensation must 
be discriminated in observation, and thereby give distinct 
quality as the matter — and this distinct quality must be 
constructed in attention, and thereby give definite quantity 
as the form — of the phenomenon. 

It is important to note, that as yet we have subjective 
idea only. There is a complete conception of the sense, 
and thus a true thought but still a void thought, and no 
knowledge of the faculty of sense as an actual existence. 
It is cognition to this degree, that such a faculty is deter- 
mined a priori to be possible in conception — the thought 
is every way self-consistent and in unity — but as yet it is 
wholly the creature of the productive imagination. That 
there is any cause which may give actual being to such a 
faculty, our complete possession of the idea by no means 
enables us to affirm. This only is determined — the arche- 
type after which the sense must be molded, if any causa- 
t : generate such an existing faculty of intelligence. In 
o subjective imagination, we make it to seem, but we have 
not in our consciousness made it to appear. 



OTHER REPRESENTATIONS OF THE SENSE. 145 

It may, perhaps, conduce to give greater distinctness, 
though not more completeness, to this subjective idea of 
the sense, if we add here some of the representations made 
of it by distinguished Philosophical Thinkers. As the first 
and lowest form of intellectual action it is important that 
we apprehend it aright, and so be competent to make the 
sharp distinctions which separate it from higher faculties, 
a« well as that we may attain an adequate comprehension of 
it in itself. 

The very ingenious representation given by Plato, in the 
Republic, Book VII., commonly little understood or rather 
often misunderstood, is worthy of our first notice. In the 
latter part of Book VI. he has been speaking of the Good, 
which, as supreme and absolute, can not be brought within 
any forms of representation but can only be affirmed through 
analogies, and he represents that pure science has the same 
relation to it, that our knowledge of phenomena in sense 
has to pure science. The intelligible species has reference 
to the good, as the sensible species has to the intelligible ; 
and his resemblance of both in their analogy according to 
the Pythagorean mode, is by the division of a mathematical 
line. Let a line be divided unequally, and then divide again 
both these unequal parts in a ratio in each to the original 
division of the whole ; and when these parts, in their pro- 
portional divisions, are set over one against the other, the 
larger in its proportional division may be taken to represent 
the intelligible, and the smaller in its proportional division 
the sensible species.- The first has its own larger division, 
and this represents pure intellect or reason giving the axioms 
and d priori truths as the foundations of pure science ; and 
it also has its smaller division, which represents the intelli- 

1 



146 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

gible process, or dianoetic part, in a pure geometrical or 
mathematical demonstration. The second has also its larger 
division, and this represents the generalization which as uni- 
versal rule is assumed from some broad induction of parti- 
cular cases; and moreover this has its smaller division, 
which represents the sensible phenomena themselves as the 
facts in the induction. We have then the empirical facts 
given in sense, and which are the mere phenomenal shadows 
and images of the things themselves— and these bound up 
in an assumed general law, which can have verification no 
further than the inductive experience reaches, and is thus as 
universal law resting upon hypothesis and faith only and 
not science — to be represented under the divisions of the 
smaller part of the original line : and then we have the suc- 
cessive steps of a mathematical demonstration, and which 
are pure intuition — and these, held in then axioms and neces- 
sary truths of the pure reason, giving rational science — to 
be represented under the divisions of the larger portion of 
the original line. And now, the inductive science of the 
former is analogous to the rational science of the latter, in 
this respect, that the inductive is the mere resemblance of 
the rational, as the rational is the archetypal emission, or 
educed paradigm, of the absolute and ineffable Good. 

From this, in the beginning of Book VII. Plato proceeds 
to the representation which is of immediate interest in the 
present place. For the purpose of showing how far short 
of true science all attainments of sense must be, he gives 
his conception of what the sense is in the ingenious repre- 
sentation referred to. A subterraneous Dwelling is adduced 
with an entrance expanding to the light and giving an open- 
ing to the entire cave. The persons within are chained by 



OTHER REPRESENTATIONS OF THE SENSE. 147 

the neck so as to be unable to look except upon the wall of 
the cavern opposite to the opening. A bright light without, 
far above and behind them, illummes the opposite wall, and 
a road, over which perpetually passes men bearing statues 
and vessels and figures of all animated and material nature, 
lies along without the cave and between the bright light 
and the entrance. The shadows of all these passing figures 
projected upon the opposite wall are seen by the dwellers 
within, and any voices of the world without come to them 
only as echoes from the cavern wall, and seemingly as the 
voices of the moving shadows. To them, thus, nothing is 
true but shadows and echoes. These they regard intently, 
watching their appearance, and deducing the general laws 
of their successions and changes. 

Should one suddenly be loosed and turned towards the 
light, he would be wholly confounded, and it would be long 
before he could comprehend the true position of things, 
know the realities, and bear the direct splendor of the sun- 
light in open vision. When this was thoroughly effected, 
and he should again talk with the chained inmates of the 
cave, his pure knowledge would be but transcendental rav- 
ings for them, inasmuch as to the prisoners of sense the 
eternal verities above sense are but simply as ^cmsense. 
How sincerely would he pity their conceited empiricism ! 
How willingly would he forego all the encomiums, honors, 
and rewards which they were lavishing upon any who more 
acutely observed the passing shadows, discovered a new 
one, or best remembered how they were wont to succeed 
each other or appear together ! This is an outline of the 
method in which Plato exhibits the manner of phenomenal 
appearance, and to which it might be added, that to each 



148 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

prisoner his own shadow is all that he can make of himself 
to be objective to his own vision. The qualities of things 
perpetually occupy the attention, and the sense is forced to 
absorb its entire functions in attaining the appearances of 
things, while a rational philosophy alone can reach the living 
and eternally abiding verities. 

A position for an a priori investigation of the sense 
would be given in this imagined cave of Plato, by suppos- 
ing the man who had attained to the realities of things in 
the bright sunlight without, to come and sit down before 
the vacant back- wall of the cavern, and from the conditional 
principles of the transmitted light from without, determine 
how the shadows must there arrange themselves, in any an- 
ticipation of an inner content being given. 

But a more complete illustration is given in some of the 
suggested analogies by Coleridge, in which, for the wall of 
the cave, we substitute a broad mirror. There will be the 
resemblance of whatever comes before the mirror, to the eye 
placed in a proper position ; and so far as the mirror reveals 
the appearance, it can only be the resemblance of the thing 
and not the thing itself. The eye, thus, is to the mirror, as 
the intellect to the sensibility. The mirror has its own pure 
space, as primitive intuition ; but that space is subjective to 
the mirror, and of no significancy to the thing itself which 
may give its resemblance within it. Some content must be 
given to the mirror, or no resemblance can appear ; nor can 
this appearance be the thing itself, but only a phenomenal 
envisagement of it. The eye can by no means see itself, but 
only its resemblance. A faculty for perceiving the thing, 
and not merely its resemblance, would demand the capacity 
to receive and construct the content into form, other than 



OTHER HE PRESENTATIONS OF THE SENSE. 149 

within the illuminated space of the mirror ; or, that the 
mirror should become transparent, and the thing appre- 
hended directly through it. 

As analogy for the subjective idea of the sense, the mir- 
ror only is conceived, and its content taken as anticipation 
in general ; and then, from the conditioning principles of all 
reflection and representation of images, an a priori deter- 
mination is made, of how the resemblances of things in a 
mirror is possible. This will give the complete thought of 
how any resemblance of things may be, but this can be only 
an imaginary seeming for the subject thinking, and not any 
appearance either for himself or others. 

The method of Kant is to give the functions of the 
sense, not by any illustration, but in a direct statement of 
the process of perception. With his terminology fully un- 
derstood, there is no further difficulty in attaining his mean- 
ing than what is necessarily incidental to so abstruse a 
subject. With him the sense is solely the faculty of envis- 
agement, or of representing things themselves in their phe- 
nomenal appearances. The intellectual operations of dis- 
criminating and constructing, he refers to the work of the 
understanding ; and thus excludes from the functions of the 
sense, that which gives distinctness and deiiniteness of fig. 
ure to the phenomenon. The sense is the illuminated wall 
of the cave, or the reflecting surface of the mirror ; but the 
chained prisoner, or the fixed eye before the mirror, is the 
conjoining agent, not as in the field of the sense but in the 
field of the understanding, and this operation of conjunc- 
tion is not at all distinguished from an operation of connec- 
tion, which we shall hereafter see is the alone proper work 
of the understanding. 



150 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

With this functional instrumentality for envisaging, 
which the organism of sense supplies, the process of percep- 
tion, as a work to be accomplished, then goes on in the 
understanding ; and it is simply his method of describing 
the operation of conjunction, which we have already given 
after our manner of investigation. The conjunction of the 
content in sense gives to it unity ; and that there may be 
this unity in the product, it is necessary that there be a 
higher unity in the understanding agency producing it. 
This unity in the product, he terms " Synthetic Unity," or, 
inasmuch as it is one mfember in his category of quantity, 
sometimes he calls it the *" Categorical Unity." The higher 
unity in the understanding, inasmuch as it gives the unity 
to all quality as product, is termed " Qualitative Unity." 
In this higher unity lies the capacity to accompany all rep- 
resentations, so that each may, to the mind, be its represen- 
tation and thus all be in one consciousness. This accom- 
panying and uniting all representations in one consciousness, 
and which yet can not itself be represented in" any appear- 
ance, he calls technically the " I think y" and there is thus 
the same " I think " for every representation, and which 
holds all in its own original unity. This he terms " the 
original unity of apperception? Except for this original 
unity of apperception, every representation would have its 
own separate " I think ;" and therefore, as he says, u I 
should have as many colored different a self as I have repre- 
sentations of which I am conscious." This bringing of all 
representations under the one " I think," is the highest prin- 
ciple of all cognition, and the faculty in virtue of which we 
are competent to unite the diverse in one, and, therefore, as 
in one consciousness, make each representation to be an ob- 



OTHER EEPEESENTATIOSS OF THE SENSE. 151 

ject as my object. "It is the highest point to which we 
must attach all use of the understanding ; in fact this is the 
understanding itself." 

We will refer here but to one other explanation of the 
function which brings phenomena into distinct conscious- 
ness, and thus would render the perceptions of the sense 
intelligible, and that is the method given by Descartes. 

His whole theory is contained in the germ which has its 
concise expression in the noted formula " Cogito ergo sum" 
This has been interpreted in two ways, having their mean- 
ing and use very distinct from each other. One makes it to 
be a logical proof of the reality of my existence. It is an 
ontological syllogism, and concludes in the demonstration of 
real being. Now, in this method of interpretation, and which 
has been the most commonly made, it has really no interest 
in, nor connection with, any inquiry after the functions of 
the sense. Its sole use is to prove the real being of myself. 
But it may be proper, here, to say that in any such applica- 
tion, it can be nothing other than an empty sophism. It 
covers an absurdity, and has thus no logical force except in 
its delusion. If we postulate " the thinking" and would 
thence deduce the I as existing self, the conclusion is a non 
sequitur, inasmuch as the fact of a phenomenon of thinking 
does not give the existence of the subject which thinks. 
And if we say " I think" meaning — myself to exist think- 
ing — the whole is a petitio principii ; inasmuch as the exist- 
ence of the I who thinks is the very thing to be proved. 

But another interpretation brings it directly within our 
present use, as explanatory of the process for attaining to 
distinct consciousness. The " Cogito," in this meaning, 
simply involves the process by which I come to know my- 



152 THE SENSE IN ITS IDEA. 

self, or to awake in self-consciousness. By the act of think- 
ing I come into a state of self-consciousness. I think — 
meaning thereby that I perform the intellectual operation of 
conjunction already d priori given, i. e., I attend — and 
thereby construct definite objects in consciousness ; and 
such subjective operation, giving such objective phenom- 
enon, determines a distinction of my object from myself as 
subject. By thinking, I find myself. Cogito, ergo sum, not 
as process of logical demonstration that I exist, but as prac- 
tical process of coming into self-consciousness. A letter 
from Descartes himself to Gassendi would seem to fix this 
last meaning, as that which the author intended. "The 
very moment there are phenomena of any kind within our 
consciousness, that moment the mind becomes cognizant of 
its own existence ; and that were there no consciousness, 
there would be no possible evidence of the existence of an 
intelligent principle. The scientific form of this truth was 
meant to be presented in the sentence, Cogito, ergo sum" 

Here, then, we conclude our first Chapter in the Sense, 
embracing the two divisions of the pure and the empirical 
Intuition. We have a completed Idea of how a faculty of 
sense for perceiving phenomena in consciousness may be. 
The whole is a seeming in the Imagination, and not an 
appearing in Consciousness; and is thus subjective only. 
Yet is the completed thought no fanciful and arbitrary com- 
bination of conceptions, but attained altogether through 
conditions necessary and universal. While we know that 
the product is ideal only, we know also that so the real is 
possible ; and if at all actual, that so it must be. 

It yet remains to find this whole process of the sense, as 
now d priori determined in its subjective idea, in actual 



OTHER REPRESENTATIONS OF THE SENSE. 153 

being and operation. The facts must be gathered, in which 
we can ascertain a Law of perception as binding them up 
within itself, and expounding their being and combination. 
And when such law, as objective in the facts, is determined 
to be in full accordance and correlation with the subjective 
idea, we shall have answered the claims of a criterion of 
science, and may of right take possession of the whole field 
of the sense in the name of philosophy. This will now be 
the business for our Second Chapter of the Sense. 



CHAPTER I I. 

THE SENSE IN ITS OBJECTIVE LAW. 



SECTION I. 



TRANSCENDENTAL SCIENCE IS CONDITIONED UPON A LAW IN 
THE FACTS CONFORMED TO AN A PRIORI IDEA. 

An arbitrary conjunction of diverse particulars, or such 
particulars thrown together at random, would give a com- 
bination that could have no consistency or significance ; but 
when constructed according to the determination of some 
a priori conception, the whole will have an intelligent sys- 
tematic unity and be a significant and self-consistent pro- 
duct. This conjunction may be made purely in the produc- 
tive imagination and the product be only ideal, yet will the 
pure thought have its intelligible meaning. Thus a random 
aggregation of all the elementary conceptions which should 
go to the composition of a steam-engine would have no sig- 
nification, yet when combined according to the determining 
principle of such machinery, the whole would be a self-con- 
sistent thought, and contain in its unity the complete Idea 
of the steam-engine. It would give the science of what is 
possible to be when the conditions are supplied. 

But a science of the actual can be attained only in the 
facts themselves. The consistent thought can not determine 



TRANSCENDENTAL SCIENCE, ETC. 155 

that the actual thing shall be. There must for this be both 
the materials and the maker. If the materials can not be 
found the consistent thought can have no expression, and if 
the materials are given they can not constitute the thing 
until intelligently put together by the maker. The ideal 
steam-engine is but a void thought ; the materials for a 
steam-engine are yet void of thought ; the materials put to- 
gether by thought become an intelligible thing ; and the 
void thought, as Idea, carried through and conforming to 
the thought, as the Law, in the thing becomes science. 

But science is still of two distinct kinds. All science 
has the correlation of Idea and Law, but the idea may itself 
be an empirical fact or an a priori principle, and the science 
is to be distinguished in kind accordingly. If the Idea is 
still indeterminate, there is no science and at the best only 
mere opinion : If the Idea is but a fact found from experi- 
ment, there is empirical or Inductive Science ; but if the 
Idea is an a priori truth and thus a principle in its own 
light necessary and universal, there is then Science of the 
highest kind, viz., rational or transcendental science. 

Examples illustrative of the above positions may be 
given for the science of planetary systems. The hypothesis 
may be taken that the planets were originally component 
portions of the sun, and that they have been stricken off 
successively from the surface of the molten mass by the im- 
pinging of comets upon it in their perihelion passage. But 
as such hypothesis can not be determined as fact, there can 
be no determined accordance of Idea and Law, and there- 
fore no science. It is a mere guess, or at the best a more 
or less probable opinion. 

But when the grand thought was attained by the genius 



156 THE SENSE IN ITS LAW. 

of Newton that perhaps all matter gravitates toward all 
other matter, and a broad induction found the facts con- 
formable, and that the ratio was directly as the quantity of 
matter and inversely as the squares of the distances, then 
was there a science of planetary systems in the complete 
conformity of idea and law. The one thought simple as 
truth, universal as matter, convincing as light, could then be 
applied to reconcile all paradoxes, expound all anomalies, 
and combine in harmony the facts of all past and future ob- 
servation. Further discoverers may work on under this law 
through coming generations, but the whole pathway was 
determined and the science comprehended in the thought of 
Newton. 

But genuine as is this science of the planetary worlds it 
is inductive science only. It has assumed that there is a 
uniformity through nature, and from a broad though still 
partial induction it has deduced the universal fact of gravi- 
tation and its ratios, and should it be admitted that the de- 
duction is valid and the fact of gravitation correctly attained 
for the whole universe of matter, yet would that fact be still 
inexplicable, and stand out as a mere arbitrary making with 
no rational principle to expound why it was thus and not 
otherwise. The fact being thus, planetary systems must be 
thus, but so long as the fact has no expository principle, na- 
ture itself has no rational interpretation, and w r e have a 
science of nature only in a Law which is to us wholly desti- 
tute of all reason. 

But suppose the practicability of attaining, in the neces. 
sary conception of force itself, the a priori Idea of gravita- 
tion just as the Maker of the universe had it in the morning 
of creation, and that if matter exist at all it must be in a 



TRANSCENDENTAL SCIENCE, ETC. 157 

force which shall have just such ratios and work out just 
such universal relations, and then we shall have a science 
whose highest law is no fact, or thing made, but a necessary 
principle determining in its own light the whole making. 
Such a stand-point would transcend all experiment, and de- 
termine in the necessary Idea what the Universal law must 
be, and would thus give a transcendental science. Such a 
stand-point and thus such an a priori science there certainly 
is, so sure as the universe is rationally and not arbitrarily 
made ; and its attainment by the human mind is not hope- 
lessly impracticable. But whether this be attainable or not 
in the human science of planetary systems, such a priori 
Idea for all possible functions of a Sense, which may give its 
phenomena distinct in quality and definite in quantity, has 
been now already found. 

This, it is true, is as yet given only in Idea, and is a sys- 
tematic thought only in the mind's own apprehension of it, 
but the labor in attaining it has by no means been thrown 
away. It determines for us a position relative to all facts of 
perception in sense,, as would an a priori idea of gravitation 
as above, determine our standing in reference to all the dis- 
tinctive facts of planetary systems. It enables us to say 
what the law must be as conditional that the facts may be, 
and therefore in finding the facts which have their actual law 
correlative to such idea, it enables us to give an every way 
rational exposition of our knowledge of such facts, and 
which is more than an inductive, even an a priori demon- 
strated science. Without such a rational investigation of 
the functions of sense it might certainly be very long ere we 
should attain to an inductive science of perception. The 
phenomena given in sense might indefinitely in the future as 



158 THE SENSE IN ITS LAW. 

already in the past be observed and classified under fanciful 
or arbitrary forms of arrangement, without laying hold upon 
any systematic thought which should bind up the facts in 
any scientific arrangement. But now such attained Idea 
gives at once a determined universal Law. 

And here, the remaining task in this First Part of our 
undertaking is, to find the Law in the facts of the sense 
which shall be correlative with our attained a priori Idea. 
We will proceed with this a priori Idea as we should in an 
Inductive process with any hypothesis, and for the present 
use it only as our guide to go out through the phenomena 
of the senses and thus intelligently to question nature. And 
this we will do in two ways as the modified forms of sub- 
stantially the same method, and yet tending thereby the 
more completely to establish the conviction of the conclu- 
siveness of the induction. In one way we will take the 
Idea and gather the facts as they readily admit of being 
bound up together by it, and which we will term The Colli- 
gation of Facts. In the other we shall take apparently 
quite distant and disconnected facts, and yet see them unex- 
pectedly leaping within the Idea as their Law, and which 
we will term The Consilience of Facts. We shall thus fully 
find that our attained Idea of the possible is the correlative 
to the manifest Law of the actual. 



COLLIGATION OF FACTS. 159 

SECTION II. 

THE COLLIGATION OF FACTS. 

"When any self-consistent idea, at first hypothetical^ 
assumed, may be so applied to many different facts as to 
bring them all in unity within its circumscription, and bind 
them within itself that they may thereby belong to one or- 
ganized system, each portion of which may be adequately 
expounded as determined in its place by this applied idea, 
we have then an instance of what is termed a Colligation of 
Facts. In such a result we no longer hold our applied idea 
to be hypothesis, but affirm that the facts themselves must 
possess within them a formative principle, which has con- 
trolled in their production and is the complete correlate to 
this idea which we have applied to them and that has col- 
lected and expounded them so completely ; and that, there- 
fore, there is within them an actual law, the exact counter- 
part of our applied idea. We now proceed in this way with 
our a priori attained idea of the sense, to apply it to vari- 
ous facts in the process of perception as actually occurring 
in experience, and in proportion as we find it to hold these 
facts in colligation, and thus expound their peculiarities, 
shall we be competent to affirm that we have found the law 
which must inherently have regulated their formation, and 
which thus really exists as embodied within them. This 
law thus found, as the exact correlate of the idea, enables 
us completely to explain our knowledge of the appearances 
in the facts, and thus becomes properly a science of the 
facts. 



160 THE SENSE IN ITS LAW. 

We do not now insist upon the necessity and universality 
of the idea, as having been attained through an a priori 
process, but are willing to use it for the present as mere 
hypothesis for interrogating experience, and ascertaining 
how completely it may collect the facts within itself. If it 
be found to possess the power of such colligation, it would, 
as mere hypothesis, be then verified and give to us a science 
as valid as any induction could afford ; but we may then 
bring out its a priori characteristics of necessity and uni- 
versality, and thereby give to the science a much higher 
foundation than in simple induction, viz., that of a transcen- 
dental demonstration. 

The idea, therefore, which we now adopt as hypothesis 
is, that all the facts in the process of perception must stand 
within the law which demands the intellectual operations of 
Distinction of quality and Conjunction of quantity y and 
consequently that where this law is complied with in its 
demands, there is clear perception. The process of applica- 
tion might be to take any facts in the perceiving of phen- 
omena, promiscuously as they might come to hand, and dis- 
pose of them within the circumscription of our hypothesis 
as the facts themselves might permit ; but the more philoso- 
phical and satisfactory course must be to order our induc- 
tion of facts under separate heads, and see how completely 
the hypothesis binds up all the varieties of facts under the 
different captions. "We shall make the induction sufficiently 
comprehensive to be a safe ground for deducing a real law 
and not a mere casual coincidence, but yet with no attempt 
to exhaust the facts ; other minds may pursue the same pro 
cess to an indefinite extent, as far as any facts which an 
experience in sense may furnish. 



COLLIGATION OF FACTS. 161 



1. Facts connected with obscure perception. — A 
variety of facts may be attained connected with some 
obscurity in the perceptions of the sense, and which have 
led to popular methods of accounting for the obscurity on a 
great variety of grounds, but when carefully examined they 
will all stand within the circumscription of our hypothesis, 
as the highest and most comprehensive reason which can be 
given, viz., that either the operation of Distinction in 
quality or that of Conjunction in quantity could not be 
accurately and completely effected. Sometimes it may be 
said that the sensibility of the organ is impaired ; or that 
the medium through which the content is given, as the light, 
or air, etc., is defective ; or that the object is too minute, too 
far in the distance, too much confused amid other things, or 
glancing upon the sensibility too transiently ; or that the 
mind was too intently engrossed with some other occupa- 
tion ; but all these and other popular reasons for the obscu- 
rity will at last resolve themselves into this — the intellect 
did not exactly distinguish, or did not completely construct 
them. It might be easy to arrange our facts under the 
separate heads, so that the obscurity from indistinctness and 
that from indefiniteness might hold each their own facts, but 
such subdivision is not necessary. The example will in each 
case give immediate opportunity for deciding to which, or 
whether perhaps to both, it belongs. 

When the eye rests upon some landscape replete with 
diffused and diversified lights and shades and colors, we are 
conscious of a very inadequate perception of its different 
objects until the eye has roved over the scene repeatedly 
and deliberately, and as this process goes on the perception 
comes out with more and more distinctness of the colors, 



162 THE SENSE IN ITS LAW. 

and more and more definiteness of the figures, there pre- 
sented, and the obscurity of the first look passes into clear 
perception. So, still more, when we first enter the thronged 
street of some strange city, from which new and unaccus- 
tomed sensations are very confusedly given in the thousand 
moving colors and forms of men and animals and carriages, 
and the blended sound of feet and wheels and jaring wares 
and percusion of tools and human voices perhaps of differ- 
ent languages, is it impracticable at once to perceive all, or 
perhaps even any one appearance completely. Again, we 
cast our eye upon the printed page of a book, and espe- 
cially the more to our purpose if the characters belong to an 
unknown language, and with these multiplied and blended 
sensations of lines and angles and curves and points, the let- 
ters can not at once stand forth as clear perception in con- 
sciousness. Or, only once more as an exanrple, when the 
strains of distant music from many voices and instruments 
strike upon the ear, and the complicated and modified har- 
mony is so obscure, that we can not catch the tune which 
combines all these tones in unison, the whole is but a rhap- 
sody of diverse noises in which nothing distinct and nothing 
defined is perceived. In all these, it is at once manifest that 
the operations of both distinction and conjunction are incom- 
plete, and that the obscurity is removed in proportion as 
these operations are effected by the intellectual agency, nor 
can any thing else secure a clear perception. 

There may be noticed also such facts as the following : 
A blending of the quality so effectually that though many 
peculiar varieties may be known to be there, yet can no one 
be distinguished exactly, not even by deliberate trial of the 
intellectual agency. "We are conscious of the appearance of 



COLLIGATION OP PACTS, 163 

the peculiar colors in the rainbow, yet can we neither dis- 
criminate nor construct them precisely, and hence they 
must remain confused and obscure in our perception^ though 
it be easy to distinguish the whole bow from the surround- 
ing cloud and to conjoin it in a definite figure. So we may 
take into our month food or drink compounded of various 
ingredients, and while we may be conscious of several pecu- 
liar tastes, yet may we not by the greatest care distinctly 
separate them, nor completely conjoin them so as to give 
the amount and proportions of any. 

And then, at other times, not from the confused blend- 
ing in the sensibility, but from the impracticability of attain- 
ing a complete outline, we have obscurity of perception. 
Thus the letters on a distant sign-board, or on the stern of 
some departing ship, or the wheel-house of a steamboat 
passing at a distance, may be wholly illegible though the 
colors as quality may be very distinctly apprehended. An 
object, also, at the bottom of some clear lake or stream^ 
when the surface is gently ruffled by a breeze or the undula- 
tions of the current, may be completely given in the sensa- 
tion, and the quality distinctly apprehended, and yet it may 
be utterly impossible that the form should be definitely per- 
ceived. So, again, when the content is given to the eye 
through the medium of glass or crystal, which though trans- 
parent is so curdled and the substance interfused with 
waving lines that the sensation is interrupted and distorted, 
the quality may be very well discriminated and distinctly 
perceived, and yet no function of the sense may be able to 
give definite outline and figure to the object. 

And certainly all these facts come within our applied 
idea. Precisely where we can not discriminate, there we 



x 164 THE SENSE IN ITS LAW. 

can not have distinct quality ; and where we can not con- 
struct, there we can not have definite quantity ; and when 
either the content or the form is imperfectly given, there is 
at once obscure perception, but which passes to a clear per- 
ception immediately upon the completion of the operations 
of Distinction and Conjunction. The law for the process 
of an actual perception is here abundantly realized. An 
exclusion made of the law from the process the nega- 
tion of perception follows, and to just the amount of the 
exclusion ; and the control of the law admitted, there is at 
once a distinct and defined perception of the object. The 
hypothesis as ideal, finds its counterpart here embodied as a 
reality. 

We may much enlarge our induction, by taking such 
facts as are given when only a broken and incomplete con- 
tent in sensation is effected. The portrait of some person 
may have a portion of the coloring or delineation of features 
faded or defaced by age or exposure, and the observer finds 
it wholly impracticable to perceive what peculiar face and 
expression of countenance the original picture represented. 
The intellect is incompetent to discriminate and construct 
from the sensation a complete image. But an old friend 
and former companion of the person represented may stand 
before the portrait, and the few faint lines and touches 
which remain are sufficient to awaken long-gone conceptions 
and to quicken familiar recollections, and at once the 
features of his friend are there, glowing vividly upon the 
canvas as the painter originally gave them, and he dwells 
upon the picture with deep and saddened interest. The 
well-remembered countenance of the original avails to the 
intellectual re-construction of the effaced lineaments of the 



COLLIGATION OF FACTS. 165 

painting, and what to other eyes it were impossible to find 
he perceives distinct and well defined, because his own 
agency has brought out anew the faded colors and obscured 
lines of the picture, and in the restored portrait the likeness 
of his friend has found a perfect resurrection. 

Again, some old manuscript, or an engraving on a monu- 
ment, or an ancient coin may be taken, some portions of 
which may have become so obliterated as to be utterly unin- 
telligible to ordinary readers. The sensation is too incom- 
plete for the intellectual agency to make out the construc- 
tion, and if no help be otherwise afforded for restoring the 
defaced portion there must unavoidably remain a perpetual 
hiatus in the record. But if long habit in deciphering 
obscured inscriptions, or an acquaintance from other sources 
of the facts designed to be here recorded, help the intellec- 
tual agency along the lost lines that it may fill up the chasm 
through its faintest tracings, the "whole is to that mind again 
restored and he reads a^ain aright the old record. To 
a practiced antiquary, even the slightest remnant of the 
old chisel-marks on the monument, or the touches of the 
pen upon the parchment, are sufficient for filling up what 
must otherwise have been unavoidably wide gaps in the 
inscription. Champollion could read the much effaced Hiero- 
glyphic upon a Theban tomb or column ; and Belzoni, the 
faint traces on an Egyptian papyrus or mummy covering, 
when to an unpracticed eye the whole was faded beyond 
recovery. The intellect, indeed, fills up a chasm which was 
merely a void in the sensation, and by re-constructing 
restores again the original, guided by the content which is 
given ; and is an agency very similar to that which, from 
long study in comparative anatomy, enabled Cuvier to 



166 THE SENSE IN ITS LAW, 

restore a complete antediluvian animal, whose entire species 
has long since been extinct, from a solitary fossil bone as the 
only remnant of the skeleton. 

Obscure perceptions, presenting what facts soever, will 
invariably be found to originate in an incompetency to dis- 
tinguish quality when the obscurity relates to the content, 
or an incapacity to conjoin the quantity when the obscurity 
relates to the form of the phenomenon. The intellectual 
agency can not go out under the guidance of its conditional 
law, and therefore the product of a clear perception can not 
be; but so soon as the distinguishing and conjoining agency 
may be carried into complete execution, all obscurity of 
perception is effectually avoided. Thus far in our induc- 
tion, our hypothesis collects all the facts and binds them up 
in systematic order, and determines for us that the law 
actually embodied in the facts of perception is the exact cor- 
relative of the hypothetical idea which we have been apply- 
ing to them. 

But we may pursue our induction further, under an- 
other division of facts connected with perception and exam- 
ine, 

2. Tlie relative capabilities of the different organs of 
sense. — Different organs of sense give their diverse sensa- 
tions as content for different kinds of quality, and each in 
its own manner and degree as capable of the operations of 
distinction and conjunction to be applied to it. The eye 
receives its content for colors, and the ear for sounds, etc., 
and these may be discriminated and constructed according 
as the peculiarity of the sensation in the organ may capaci- 
tate for it. It is not designed under this division to notice 
the intellectual agency in distinction £0 much as in conjunc- 



COLLIGATION OF FACTS. 167 

tion, as our object must rather be here to attain facts 
which reveal their law for form, than for peculiarity of the 
content. If, then, we find the facts to be arranged under 
our hypothetical idea, so that the capability of perceiving 
form or quantity through the sensation in any particular 
organ, is precisely as that organ is adapted for conforming 
its functions in sensation to the demand of our hypothesis as 
conditional for an intellectual construction of the quantity, 
we shall in a deeply interesting manner enlarge our induc- 
tion of facts, whose actual law is the correlative of our 
hypothetical idea. This will require us to find the facts thus 
to be, that the organ which from its functions gives the 
highest capabilities for the passing of the intellectual agency 
in attention over the content in sensation, and constructing 
it according to the operation of conjunction, shall also be 
capable of attaining to the clearest and most complete per- 
ception of the forms of its phenomena, whether of figure in 
space, period in time, or amount of intensity in the sensi- 
bility. For the purpose of thus questioning the facts in 
experience on this topic, let it be recollected that extension 
in space has three dimensions, length, breadth, and thick- 
ness ; that prolongation in time has but one measure, as in 
the flowing along through a series ; and that intensity in 
amount has also but one measure, as in the line of a contin- 
ually augmenting sum of degrees ; and we shall be prepared 
to go out and gather the facts which we may find under 
this division. 

We will first look at the relative capabilities of our or- 
gans of sense for securing the perception of forms, as exten- 
sion in Space. The Eye, as the organ of vision, is the most 
complicated, and as the result the most completely adapted 



1GS THE SENSE IN ITS LAW. 

organization, for securing the construction and thereby the 
perception of extension in the figures of phenomena. The 
intellect is best capacitated through its sensation to attain 
the most complete perceptions of the shapes and relative 
positions of objects in space. In order to use the facts 
which should be gathered in this induction it is necessary 
that we take a cursory glance at the material structure of 
the eye. A bare reference is sufficient for those who have 
some understanding of its internal structure and conforma- 
tion, without any minute descriptions and explanations. 
The entire organ of the eye, including its component ele- 
ments of humors aqueous and vitreous, its lens, its pupil 
dilating and contracting in proportion to the amount of 
light transmitted, its expanded nervous membrane as the 
retina, with the large optic nerve passing out on the back 
side thereof to the brain, its complicated apparatus of 
muscles for moving the entire ball of the eye or fixing it 
steady in one position, and its lid for lubrication, cleansing 
and protection, is altogether most skillfully adapted to the 
ends designed. The light is admitted and the rays diffused 
over a most sensitive surface within, and forming the images 
there as on a canvas for the use of the intellectual agent. 
The sensation is therefore conditioned by the rays of light, 
transmitted by reflection from the external object, which 
give their content for the phenomena in perception. 

In this arrangement of the organ, the whole content con- 
ditions itself both in position and outline to the place occu- 
pied upon the retina, and the sensation is modified accord- 
ingly. The whole field of the sensation is spread out in 
order, and the constructing agency in attention may sponta- 
neously move over the entire outlines given, and bring the 



COLLIGATION OF FACTS. 169 

forms of every part within the light of consciousness. The 
content is itself topical in the sensibility and the affection as 
sensation conforms to it, and this conditions the construct- 
ing agency accordingly, and thereby the phenomena are de- 
termined in their particular and relative forms of appear, 
ance. 

Moreover, there is this further important fact, that in 
one point of the retina there is a spot of higher sensibility 
than any other portion. A small point as a center has this 
acute sensibility, and from which on all sides the sensibility 
diminishes. This has been called by physiologists the sensi- 
ble spot* and is of peculiar significance in our present induc- 
tion. The muscles of the eye make it competent in its own 
motion to bring any portion at a time, and all portions suc- 
cessively, of the content upon this sensible spot for a more 
delicate and complete sensation. When the occasion re- 
quires that the intellectual agency should make a more nice 
construction, there will be spontaneously the muscular move- 
ment for bringing the more delicate outlines of the content 
upon this susceptible point in the retina, and revolving it 
there until the most minute forms have been accurately con- 
joined. It is this work which gives to the eye that peculiar 
searching motion, readily observed in another, and con- 
sciously noted in our own experience when the mind would 
attain some perception very critically and exactly. When 
the attempt is made to give to any object a very close and 
thorough inspection, the person may be made quite conscious 
of an uneasy and disquieted feeling until his eye is fixed in 

* Phil. Trans. 1823. Motions of the Eye. Bell's Bridge water Treat- 
ise. Also, Who well's PhiL of Inductive Science, Vol. L, p. 119.— Per- 
ception of Space. 

8 



170 THE SENSE IN ITS LAW. 

the right position toward the object, and the attending 
agency can move the most accurately and completely over 
the content as this is made to revolve upon the sensible spot ? 
and in this way bring the form into clearer and sharper out- 
line in consciousness. All that the motion of the eye, and 
the turning of the head to favor it, may take within the 
sensibility of the organ itself, and which in succession may 
be the whole hemisphere, can in this manner be successively 
brought to revolve upon this sensitive portion of the retina 
foi its more exact construction in a perception, and the com- 
pleteness of the form will be proportioned to the exactness 
of such a construction. All these facts in the capacity of 
the eye as organ for perceiving figure come remarkably 
within the circumscription of our ideal hypothesis, and 
manifest that their actual law is in entire correlation with it. 
But we may extend our induction to the facts given in 
the capabilities of the Touch for perceiving form in exten- 
sion. The organization here is not so nice and complicated 
in its arrangements as in that of vision, but to the whole 
amount of its capacity for giving sensation which may be 
conjoined into form, the facts come completely within the 
same hypothesis, and evince for themselves the same actual 
law. The fingers — and by use other parts of the body may 
be made to subserve the same ends— are the organs of sen- 
sibility in which are given the sensations of touch. The 
ends of the fingers have their delicate nervous expansion 
and which also have their connection with the central senso- 
rium in the brain by as complete a medium as the optic 
nerve, though a more extended communication than that. 
When these are brought in contact with any resisting ob- 
ject, a content is at once given in the sensation, and they 



COLLIGATION OP FACTS. 171 

become as the sensible spot in the eye, and condition the 
attending agency in the same manner. The content must 
be given to the organ through its contact with the outward 
resistance, and that the form as figure in space may be per- 
ceived, the fingers must pass over this resisting object as the 
content in the eye was made to revolve upon the sensible 
spot in the retina, and thereby the conjoining operation is 
effected and the form is completed in the attention. We do 
not here, however, find an expanded field of the sensibility 
for receiving topically the content for many phenomena at a 
time, as in vision. The broad landscape, the wide expanse 
of the distant heavens, with all their complicated outlines, 
are not within the capacity of this organ of sensibility. 
One by one, and within quite a limited range, must the 
objects gained by the touch be perceived, and thus in com- 
paratively a narrow field alone is the operation of construc- 
tion at any one time carried on. But within these limits 
the perception of figure and position by the touch are very 
accurate. When we have constructed the form through the 
sensation in the eye, almost instinctively do we reach forth the 
fingers to attain tjie content in a new sensation, and subject 
the same to a new construction. Especially if the object be 
small, and near at hand, the intellect rejoices in the diversi- 
fied manner of construction, and the confirmation of percep- 
tion by two operations. The touch adds its own definite- 
ness to the shape as it appeared in vision. Though not over 
so broad a field, yet Avithin its own scope, the sense of touch 
may give form in space as accurately as the sense of sight. 
From the habitual exercise and cultivation of the sense of 
touch, the blind attain to a surprising accuracy of percep- 
tion thereby. They follow out raised letters with their fin- 



172 THE SENSE IN ITS LAW. 

gers, and read with almost the facility that is given to 
others by the use of their eyes ; and they have been able to 
trace the lines in sensation, such as those, say, in nicely 
joined cabinet work, where all perception of the eye com- 
pletely failed. 

We will extend the induction to the facts found in other 
organs of sense, and inasmuch as we shall find no capacity 
to perceive figure by them, so we shall find that they give 
no content in a manner that the intellect can conjoin its di- 
versity, as extensive, in unity. The operation of conjunc- 
tion can not be, and therefore shapes can not by them be 
perceived. 

The organs of Hearing are on opposite sides of the head, 
and thus quite favorable for giving the content in such a 
manner that it may be determined from what direction the 
sound has come. The ear which has received content in the 
greatest intensity will of course be an occasion for deciding 
that the sound has come from that side. The modifications 
in intensity through different experiences may afford the 
ground for some vague estimate of the distance from the 
center whence the undulations have proceeded. All such 
construction is necessarily comparative, and therefore quite 
imperfect, and yet complete precisely in proportion to the 
capacity of the organ to furnish the content in such a man- 
ner that it may be brought within an attending agency. 
But this vague estimate of direction and distance is all that 
can be secured of form in space by the organ of hearing. 
All conjoining into figure, and giving a determined shape 
and outline of object by the ear is impracticable. The sen- 
sation is not so spread out on any field, nor can the organ 
so go over it in contact, that the intellect may conjoin it 



COLLIGATION OF FACTS. 173 

into shape, and give form to the phenomenon. The organi- 
zation may sometimes have its modifications in an elonga- 
tion or expansion of the external portion of the ear, as in 
the horse or the hare, and very probably also a nicer con- 
struction and conformation of the inner ear may be given 
to some animals than to others. The intensity of sound 
may be thereby augmented, and direction and distance be 
more accurately apprehended. Such expansion of the outer 
ear and its easy movement in all directions subserves pre- 
cisely the same end as the artificial ear-trumpet for the deaf, 
by which a greater volume of content is brought within the 
sensibility. But this avails nothing toward such a presenta- 
tion of the content that an operation of conjunction may be 
effected, by which outlines may be constructed, and thereby 
figures in space perceived. 

The organ of Smell is also in many of its facts very simi- 
lar. The aroma may come into the sensibility in larger 
amount, and thus with more intense sensation when the 
organ is in a given position, and thereby direction and dis- 
tance may be vaguely estimated as the point from whence 
the effluvia have come. But nothing is here capacitated for 
giving the perception of shapes to odors. The organ may 
be more or less perfected in its conformation, and thereby a 
more intense sensation may be given, as in the dog or the 
vulture, and in this way distance and direction be more 
accurately apprehended, but no perfection of organization 
can in this way give the capacity of perceiving figure in 
space by the smell, inasmuch as there is no adaptation to 
the conditions demanded for the necessary intellectual con- 
struction. 

The facts in the sense of Taste should also be put in the 



174 THE SENSE IX ITS LAW. 

induction. From this organization there is not capacity for 
perceiving even position in space. The sensation is condi- 
tioned to the savory object coming in contact with the organ 
and being chemically dissolved upon it, and thus the sense 
of touch is to be wholly excluded. The quality discrimina- 
ted may have form as amount, as prolonged, but not as 
extended. Not even position, and much less figure in space, 
can be perceived in any sapidity. There ■ is nothing of the 
homogeneous diverse, as extensive, given in the content, and 
consequently nothing which may be conjoined into shape. 

Thus, then, with all our organs of sense ; the facts are 
held in colligation by our ideal hypothesis, and in all cases 
evince this actual law, that the capacity to perceive form as 
extension in space is found in the actual operation of con- 
junction, and where that can not be effected, there it is 
impracticable that any figure should be perceived. 

We will further bring within our induction under this 
division, the facts connected with the capacity of the sense 
for perceiving phenomena in the forms of prolonged Time. 
The operation of conjunction is, in the protensive, in one 
measure only, and constructs period in the flowing series of 
successions. All sensation in any organ of sensibility is, as 
discriminated quality, a conscious affecting of my inner state, 
and thereby giving the homogeneous diversity as protensive 
in time. As the affection goes on in the continuance of the 
quality, or the perpetual alteration of qualities, the diverse 
instants admit of a conjoining operation which constructs 
them into definite periods, and the qualities are thus given 
as phenomena in their forms of time. One kind, or one 
variety of quality, is as much as another readily subjected 
to this operation of conjunction which constructs its form in 



COLLIGATION OF FACTS. 175 

time. No one organ has a different capacity in respect to 
forms in time from another. 

Thus, take any color as quality in vision. Its topical 
arrangement on the retina, as the field of sensation, gives 
peculiar capacity for constructing its figure in space, espe- 
cially in the capability for revolving the sensation in the 
whole field over the sensible spot, as before considered. 
But such facility for the operation of conjunction in exten- 
sion avails nothing for conjunction in prolongation. The 
bare sensation in any organ may give diverse instants in the 
affecting of the inner state as completely as when the sensa- 
tion is spread out topically upon an expanded field of the 
sensibility. I may thus as readily construct the period of a 
sound, an odor, or a taste, as a color or all the colors defi- 
nitely arranged in a landscape. All sensation in any organ 
induces modified affections of the internal state, and thereby 
as inner sense come within time, and may thus fill the forms 
of time through a definite construction of them, and be per- 
ceived as phenomena having their exact periods ; and no 
sensation, in this capacity, for conjunction in the form of 
time, has any advantage above another, nor in point of fact 
do we perceive the period of the quality in one organ, more 
readily nor more perfectly than in another. 

We induce also the facts connected with the perception 
of Intensity in sensation. And here, again, manifestly the 
facts are that I can perceive degrees in the amount of the 
quality, as well when given in one organ of the sense as in 
another. The organ of vision or of touch has capacity for 
an intellectual constructing of figure in space, when all 
other organs are destitute of all that can capacitate for such 
an operation j but this does not give capacity for an intellec- 



176 THE SENSE IN ITS LAW. 

tual construction of the degree in intensity, or amount, for 
the sensation in the eye or the touch any more readily or 
completely than for the sensation in the smell or the taste. 
I can as well perceive how much sweet or bitter there is in 
intensity, as I can how much redness, or hardness there is. 
And this fact manifestly comes within our hypothesis, inas- 
much as all construction of intensity, or amount, must be 
of one measure in all quality, simply as a conjunction of 
degrees from void sensation up to the given intensity, and 
this as truly for quality in taste as for quality in vision. 
One organ has no prerogative over another, but each equally 
gives its content over to the attending agency, that the 
limits of its amount may be constructed for, and thus be 
brought within, the light of consciousness. 

Here, then, we have a very broad field of most interest- 
ing facts, all held in complete colligation by our ideal 
hypothesis. In all operations of conjunction the form is 
given in perception precisely proportioned to the capacity 
of the organ for giving the diverse sensation to the intellect 
that it may be so conjoined in unity. The organs of vision 
and touch give figure in space, and they alone, inasmuch as 
no other organ gives the diverse in extension as content in 
the sensation. But all organs alike give phenomena in the 
forms of time and amount, because they all alike have the 
diverse instants of duration, and diverse degrees of inten- 
sity, in their own sensation as content, and which, in each, 
the intellect may alike construct within their respective 
limits. The ideal hypothesis and the actual law in all these 
facts are manifestly correlatives. The original conforma- 
tion of our whole organization of the sense must have had 
its regulation in such an idea as its archetype. And in this 



COLLIGATION OF FACTS. 177 

we may see the beauty and the truth of Plato's representa- 
tions, so little understood, so often by an empirical perver 
sion misunderstood and then derided as a visionary fancy, 
viz., that the idea in the absolute reason — the Divine Idea 
— has been breathed into shapeless matter, and thus that 
which had otherwise been wholly amorphous and formless 
has put on order and beauty ; and this idea, as if it were 
an infused soul, has given vitality and unity. With all the 
wonderful elements in the organs of the sense, how mani- 
festly as inert and useless to all the ends of perception as 
the dust into which they ultimately crumble must they have 
been, had not their Almighty Maker put this original idea 
into them, as their upholding and /^-forming law of combi- 
nation and functional operation. 

There is still another division, including many interesting 
facts, which it is important should be brought within the 
induction which we are now making, and which may be 
given as — 

3. Deceptive appearances. — There are many facts con- 
nected with deceptive appearances in the sense, and delu- 
sive phenomena as perceived, which are held in colligation 
by this same ideal hypothesis, and which must therefore 
have their actual law as its correlative, and which we will 
now proceed to bring within our induction. In this division 
the facts are rather connected with the operation of conjoin- 
ing into form, than distinguishing the content, and yet so 
far as they have any connection with the quality perceived, 
they will confirm the conditions of the operation of distinc- 
tion for all perception of distinct qualities. There is, in 
these facts, an operation of conjunction effected, and thus 
form appears ; but because the operation has been other 



178 THE SENSE IN ITS LAW. 

than the conditions of the content demanded, the form de- 
ceptively appears, and thus the perception is partially or 
wholly an illusion. The facts are not of obscure, but of 
false perceptions. A distorted medium, or a partial sensa- 
tion, may condition the construction of the form that it shall 
be quite a false appearance. The ring of Saturn may ap- 
pear as two handles upon the opposite sides of the planet, 
from the conditions in which the content is given in the sen- 
sibility. The agency in attention may thus be led astray by 
some imperfection in the condition of the sensation. 

Thus, when in vision the content is received through a 
dense fog, or perhaps in the twilight, there may often be, 
not an indefinite appearance merely, but quite a deceptive 
and false perception. The content has not been spread upon 
the field of the sensibility with any sharpness of outline, 
and can not, even when carefully revolved upon the sensible 
spot, give any exact conditions for the constructing agency, 
and the operation of conjunction is thus left very much to 
some scheme of the imagination. The habits, temperament, 
sympathies, and emotions of the person may thus very much 
modify the shapes which the matter in sensation shall as- 
sume in their appearance, and may be of beautiful, or mon- 
strous, or grotesque and ludicrous illusions. The old story 
of the gay young lady and the superstitious curate, viewing 
the moon in company through a telescope, is quite in point. 
" Those two shadows," says the lady, " which stand side by 
side together are surely two happy lovers in affectionate 
conversation." " Ah ! I see," says the curate, " two lovers ! 
not at all ; they are the two steeples of a grand Cathedral." 
Personal experience and frequent observation may gather 
an indefinite number of effects of the same description, 



COLLIGATION OF FACTS. 179 

where the sensation has been constructed very deceptively 
through the influence of the imagination in its hopes or its 
fears. 

So with the facts connected with tricks of legerdemain, 
or sleight-of-hand, which are often of so marvelous a de- 
scription. The arrangement of surrounding objects, the 
lights and shades, manifestations and concealments, together 
with the attitudes and motions of the conjurer are so art- 
fully contrived and skillfully managed that the attending 
agency of the spectator is induced to move in a certain 
designed direction, and thereby to construct the intended 
forms, and which thus appear in the consciousness as verita- 
ble phenomena. From the sensation as partially given, the 
productive imagination is induced to construct such forms 
as may seem to fill up the chasms in the content, and all this 
so readily and unsuspectingly that the completed product in 
appearance is taken to be entire reality, and the cunning 
delusion becomes the supposed perception of the most sur- 
prising occurrences, and the deceptive wonders are related 
abroad as the facts of eye- witnesses. When, through feints 
and artful management, the intellectual agency is induced to 
construct such products as the operator intended, while the 
actual content hi the sense as given is not discriminated from 
that which is merely supposed, the delusion will be com- 
plete, and the credulity partake of the sincere conviction 
which belongs to a genuine perception. The distinguishing 
operation has been incomplete, and the constructing opera- 
tion though complete, yet deceptive, and thereby the most 
marvelous prodigies, ludicrous absurdities, and startling im- 
possibilities except as miraculous, become the strange per- 
ceptions of our own eyes, The constructing agency of the 



180 THE SENSE IN ITS LAW. 

spectator lias been the real conjurer, but as that has been 
artfully deluded in its work, the deception which it has been 
induced to practice upon itself is wholly overlooked, and the 
cheat is not detected. 

The vans of a wind-mill in motion, when the axle lies in 
such a direction to the eye that it is difficult to determine 
from the sensation merely which end of the shaft it is that 
is nearest to our position, may easily be made to turn in 
apparently opposite directions at pleasure. The vans may 
be arbitrarily constructed as now on this end of the shaft 
and again on the other end, and the vane is of course con- 
structed as at the opposite* end of the shaft to that on which 
the vans are fixed, and thus the shaft appears to lie now in 
one direction, and again in a reversed direction. In every 
such change of construction, the movement of the vans 
must accord, and consequently if the attending act give 
them now this and now that position, their motion must 
appear in opposite directions alternately. The apparent 
motion is wholly controlled by the arbitrary construction, 
and the facts are thus in colligation by our hypothesis. 

So, again, with the waves running over the surface of 
the water according to the course of the wind, the con- 
structing operation in attention passes along with them, and 
it is quite difficult to escape from the conviction that the 
whole mass of water must be flowing in that direction. 
The wind may be blowing strongly up the current of a 
broad river, and the undulations transmit their forms 
rapidly upward, while the matter is passing downward ; the 
attention constructs these forms and gives them in appear- 
ance according to their succession, while the observation 
does not distinguish the matter which successively takes on 



COLLIGATION OF FACTS. 181 

these forms, but leaves it to appear as the same matter eon. 
stantly accompanying the same form, and thereby the entire 
river is deceptively perceived to be flowing backwards in 
its channel. But we look off upon some level meadow with 
its tall grass waving on the plain, or on the wide field of 
ripening grain — 

" That stoops its head when whirlwinds rave, 
And springs again in eddying wave, 
As each wild gust sweeps by ;" 

and the same form flows onward, and yet there our percep- 
tion is not deluded. We are forced to distinguish the mat- 
ter as perpetually changing while the form moves along, 
from the present conviction that each oscillating top has its 
stalk permanently rooted in the earth, and this at once dissi- 
pates the illusion that both matter and form are moving on 
together. The observation in its discrimination gives the 
matter as merely swinging to and fro in its place, as the 
" eddying wave " careers over the landscape, while the 
attending operation follows the forms it constructs ; and 
thus the forms flow, while the matter only swings back and 
forth in our apprehension. The practiced mariner, after 
long acquaintance with the mountain wave, dissipates all 
delusion in the same manner. He has learned to distinguish 
the matter as not the same in the same passing wave, and 
thus to his perception the waves may run in any direction, 
while he still apprehends the steadily setting course of the 
tides and currents. 

Once more, only, under this division, we have the facts 
of deceptive appearances as they are given in cases of double- 
vision. The intellectual agency is here playing the same 



182 THE SENSE IN ITS LAW. 

unnoticed delusion upon the appearance in consciousness as 
above. There is a content in both organs of vision, and 
from some derangement in the ordinary harmony of the 
sensations in both, the attending agency constructs each in 
its own definite form, and thus two objects like to each 
other appear in the consciousness. Ordinarily, the muscles 
of the eyes give to each such a direction that the content is 
topically in each after the same arrangement in reference to 
the sensible spot, and both the distinguishing and the con- 
joining agency operate according to an identity in the con- 
tent of both the organs, and thus, make but one phenom- 
enon in consciousness ; but when any derangement from 
concussion, a brain-fever, or other cause arises, or when the 
organs are imperfectly subjected to the muscular action, or 
the sensation distorted as in strabismus, or again when the 
object is placed between the eyes and too near to permit 
the axis of each to concentrate upon it, the sensation may 
be a condition for a double construction, and thus all the 
phenomena of double-vision occur. The single eye could 
not probably give the conditions for double-vision ; at least 
in order that it might give such conditions, it would be 
necessary that its content so affect the sensibility as to 
induce a double attending operation. 

A double perception is effected in the same way through 
other organs. The touch of different fingers of the same 
hand, or on the opposite hands may give a deranged sensa- 
tion inducing a double operation, both of distinction and 
conjunction, and of course resulting in a double perception. 
One may be benumbed by cold, or a bruise, or there may 
be the crossing of two fingers with the object placed 
between them, and as the content in each may thus be 



COLLIGATION OF FACTS. 183 

separately constructed, two objects will seem to be per- 
ceived. Double sounds may be given from the different 
state of the two organs presenting their sensations so modi- 
fied as to induce the separate construction of both ; but 
inasmuch as the ear is without capacity for giving figure in 
space, the double operation could not give double object in 
shape. The doubling of the object as in reflection from a 
mirror in sight, or of an echo in sound, is not properly a 
double perception, inasmuch as the content given direct and 
that in reflection are really different, and their discrimina- 
tion must be effected as in any difference of content. 
Where the organ is not double the perception is not two- 
fold, though in single organs the sensations may vary from 
the same occasions at different times, from some modifica- 
tions in the state of the sensibility. Thus the same odors, 
or the same food, or wine, may differ widely in the percep- 
tion in states of sickness from those of health. 

Under all the foregoing divisions, we have now taken 
many facts, and many more might be readily brought 
within our induction, and it is here quite evident that they 
are all readily bound up in our ideal hypothesis with which 
we commenced, and are thus brought into complete colliga- 
tion. All these facts have embodied within them one actual 
law of their being, and which law we now know to be in per- 
fect correlation with our assumed hypothesis as idea; and thus 
fir we have a science of these facts, because we can expound 
them in their own law of being and arrangement. And 
now, it would be safe, as an inductive science, to say here 
that our induction of facts has been sufficiently broad to 
warrant the deduction, that the law in these facts in the 
process of perception is the law for perception itself univer- 



184 THE SENSE IX ITS LAW. 

sally, and thus to conclude that all the facts which experi- 
ence may give us in any perceptions will be found in colliga- 
tion with those already attained. It is, however, competent 
to very much further corroborate such a conclusion, by 
what we have termed the Consilience of -Facts, and to 
which we will devote the next section, previously to any 
general deductions from the facts attained within the com- 
prehension of our hypothetical idea. 



SECTION III. 

THE CONSILIENCE OF FACTS. 

When facts, which have apparently a very remote bear- 
ing from each other, and which at first seem widely discon- 
nected, and would induce the expectation that if they are 
ever made explicable it must be from reasons and principles 
very diverse from each other, are yet found to leap together, 
as it were, in colligation with facts more manifestly allied, 
and which may have already been brought together in an 
induction, we have a case of what we here term the Consili- 
ence of Facts. The confidence in the general law thus 
deduced is augmented in proportion to the number of the 
facts and the distance whence they thus jump together 
within the same hypothesis. 

An illustration of the force of such facts to corroborate 
the general law may be given in the example of the preces- 
sion of the equinoxes as leaping within the law of universal 
gravitation. The longitude of the fixed stars, measured 



THE CONSILIENCE OF FACTS. 185 

from the point where the sun's annual path cuts the equa- 
tor, will from time to time change, if that point changes. 
Now the fact of such a change had been very early noticed 
by Hyparchus and observed by subsequent astronomers for 
near two thousand years. But for such a fact, no explana- 
tion was found. The phenomenon appeared, but stood quite 
anomalous among the other facts of astronomy. But when 
Newton had made the grand discovery of the law of gravi- 
tion, and had applied it to the explanation of many facts of 
planetary motion readily embraced within it, this remote 
and apparently wholly disconnected fact of the equinoctial 
precession was found very unexpectedly to leap within the 
same generalization with the apparently much nearer allied 
phenomena in the heavens. The equatorial diameter of the 
earth is greater than its polar diameter from the aggrega- 
tion of matter accumulated about the equatorial region 
through its diurnal /evolution, and of course the action of 
gravity which is as the quantity of matter must be thus 
modified. The disturbing force hereby induced is, when 
accurately calculated, precisely that which accounts for this 
change of point in the sun's annual path, and thereby solves 
the whole anomaly. The leaping of so remote and remark- 
able a fact within the same general law which had become 
readily applied to more obvious phenomena was an unan- 
swerable confirmation of the general law, since no mere 
casual coincidences could have resulted in such extended 
systematic connection. It was a most beautiful manifesta- 
tion of the comprehensiveness of the law and the harmony 
of its operation. 

And here facts may be found which leap within our 
ideal hypothesis for perception, quite as remote from the 



186 THE SENSE IN ITS LAW. 

others embraced as in the ease of the precession of the 
equinoxes within the general law of gravitation, and though 
not as remarkable in themselves, yet tending as effectually 
to corroborate the general law, within which they unex- 
pectedly come in consilience. Some of these facts we now 
proceed to include in our induction. 

The arts of drawing and painting have their facts which 
may readily be seen to come within this consilience of induc- 
tions. The two may be taken as one, in those respects in 
which both are designed to represent form as extension in 
space. The ideal creations in the mind of the artist, sub- 
jectively, are the product and proof of his genius ; but 
when he would give to these ideals an objective representa- 
tion, he is conditioned to just such a process of delineation 
and coloring as he would be in representing s'ome original 
actually existing in nature. His idea, as a landscape, a face, 
or a group of objects material, vegetable, and animal, must 
be drawn and painted in the same method of operation as if 
he were actually taking some copy from nature. Separate 
from the creative invention of his genius, he is necessarily a 
copyist according to the conditions imposed by nature itself; 
and the completed product must be tested by its general 
conformity with these conditions of nature. If that which 
is put upon the canvas in its outline and coloring gives such 
an appearance as that ideal would if made to exist in nature, 
the operation is complete and the painter is perfect in his 
art. In the execution of this part of his work he must 
derive instruction from observation and practical experience. 

Where the representation is to be made without the col- 
oring in its lights and shades in painting, the result is ef- 
fected simply by drawing lines in a skillful manner to give 



THE CONSILIENCE OF FACTS. 187 

the figures and proportions of nature ; and to see how exact 
the copy, may thus be made, even in minute and very peculiar 
expressions, we need merely to glance at some finished pro- 
duction in sketching or engraving in outline. How is this 
surprising resemblance effected ? Certainly by copying na- 
ture, in some way, and yet not at all in making the product 
itself like nature, but solely by inducing the spectator him- 
self to construct such a product. In the picture there has 
been used nothing but certain lines with their curves and 
angles, while in nature, animate or inanimate, no lines are 
presented to the eye and only masses of color and combina- 
tions of light and shade. A definite portion of space is thus 
filled, and, as content in the sensibility, is the condition for 
perceiving the object. Nature uses no pencil or engraver's 
tool to make outlines. She puts the mass of colors into 
space, and fills a definite portion, and leaves that portion 
surrounded on all sides by an outer space beyond it. When 
this is received as the content in sensation, the attending 
agency moves over it, and thereby conjoins it in the unity 
of figure which is perceived as definite object. 

And now the same intellectual operation in the spectator 
must be secured by the work of the limner. The attending 
process must be conditioned to the same track in the pic- 
ture as in nature, and in this way the appearance is a repre- 
sentation of nature. But this is effected not as nature ac- 
complishes it, by giving the whole mass of coloring termin- 
ating in exterior space on all sides, but simply by tracing 
that path in which the artist would have the spectator's at- 
tention move, by a simple line precisely where in nature the 
mass and the surrounding space meet together and limit 
each other. In this manner precisely the same construct- 



188 THE SENSE IN ITS LAW. 

ing operation, and thus precisely the same form is se- 
cured both in nature and art, and as the distinction of qual- 
ity is not here regarded, the sameness in form gives the 
likeness in representation. Nature's law is followed, rather 
than that nature's object is copied. The intellect in atten- 
tion is induced by art to move just where the content from 
nature would condition the movement. Hence the likeness 
often so very striking, from even a very few apt lines and 
nice touches. Here, certainly, are many interesting yet 
quite remote facts leaping direct]y within the induction 
which we had before bound in colligation by our ideal hy- 
pothesis. 

And still further, when the painter pursues his work and 
would imitate nature not merely in outline, but completely 
in the whole mass of color, and thereby secure the same 
sensation as nature's own objects would, the facts in this 
case have also a like remarkable consilience within the induc- 
tion before attained. 

The condition for constructing the figure of the object 
from nature is, that the masses of color shall fill their own 
places topically in the field of the sensibility. The limita- 
tions of the object in the surrounding space secure that the 
whole content in sensation shall observe this condition. 
But, as thus received, the outline is that of a plane superfi- 
cies merely. Whether convex or concave, the outline is as 
of a plane surface only. Thus a sphere and a circle of 
equal diameters may either of them fill the same space ; a 
column will have the same boundaries in space as a board of 
equal length and breadth ; and each of these will also have 
the same outline as a concave body of equal longitudinal 
and lateral dimensions. Thus, also, of all angular forms ; 



THE CONSILIENCE OF FACTS. 189 

a square when turned obliquely fills in space the outlines of 
a parallelogram ; a cube may have its visible sides in such a 
position as to fill, not equal squares, but oblong spaces ; a 
circle may have the outline of an ellipse by being turned 
obliquely in its plane, and when its plane is in the axis of 
vision it may even become a straight line in the appearance ; 
and a cone fills the space of a triangle. The limits of all 
these in space are, respectively, like each other. 

But in our experience a difference is perceived in all 
these forms. We distinguish quite readily plane from 
spherical bodies, squares from parallelograms, and cubes 
from solids of unequal sides. So, also, a small object near 
to the eye may fill the same place in the sensibility as a 
much larger and proportionally more distant body : and yet 
in our experience we shall readily distinguish the near and 
the smaller from the distant and the larger. The conditions 
for such an experience is what we need to find as explana- 
tory of the results. The content in the sensibilility must be 
so given that the peculiarity of forms and distance may be 
constructed. And when a careful examination is made of 
the facts, those conditions are readily found. When the 
outline, as given topically in the sensibility, is the same for 
different figures and distances, there are yet other condi- 
tions by which the right construction is induced. The 
sphere and the circle may occupy the same place topically 
on the retina, and be alike revolved nicely over the sensible 
spot, and if nothing but bare outline be constructed, no dif- 
ference of figure could be perceived. But the sphere has, 
as a content in the sensibility, a diversity giving peculiar 
quality, as distinguishable from the content of the circle. 
The colors which give light and shade in the sphere are not 



190 THE SENSE IN ITS LAW. 

in the circle. And thus is it with planes and convex or con- 
cave bodies, a board and a column, or a triangle and a cone, 
their contents differ ; and as these are distinguished, the at- 
tending agency gives a differently constructed form, and 
thereby a perception of different figure. In painting, this 
difference of quality in light and shade needs only to be sup- 
plied on the canvas, and the attention gives the form as in 
the lights and shades of nature. With distances, again, 
there is not only the difference of light and shade, but also 
of sharpness and prominence of outline in the sensibility 
between the near and the more distant, which are to be ob- 
served in distinction ; and as a still more remarkable condi- 
tion, the capacity of getting the different optic angles^ for 
the near and the more remote object, by the position of the 
two organs in the different inclinations of their optic axes 
toward the object ; or, when still more distant, the different 
inclinations when the head is in one place, and when moved 
to the right or left and the axes there directed to the object. 
Such optic angle as larger or smaller, gives the object as 
nearer or more remote, and this is to be attended to in the 
conjunction. By thus distinguishing the content in its lights 
and shades, its intensity and sharpness of outline in the sen- 
sation as different for different distances, and constructing 
the different optic angles, the less for the more distant and 
the larger for the nearer object, distance is conditioned in 
the perception as readily as figure from light and shade 
alone. The eye comes thus to perceive figures, magnitudes, 
and distances, with a most surprising exactness. The con- 
ditions for perceiving different shapes when the outlines are 
the same, and different sizes and distances when all are on 
one plane of the retina as given in the sensation, are thus 



THE CONSILIENCE OF FACTS. 191 

made quite manifest. And that, through all their complica- 
tion and remoteness from the other facts in our induction, 
these do yet leap together within our hypothesis, gives 
great confirmation to the deduction of our universal law. 

That the conditions for distance, magnitude, and figure, 
have as above been correctly given is also manifest from 
other facts, which also come leaping within the same induc- 
tion. Thus for distances and magnitudes we have the fol- 
lowing facts. When the eye receives its content in the sen- 
sibility through the medium of a spy-glass, the magnitude 
of the object is precisely in the ratio of the greater angle, 
which it is made to subtend through the more or less diver- 
gency given to the rays of light by the optic glass as a lens. 
The distance, also, is in the same ratio diminished. But if, 
now, we will invert the spy-glass and look at the same 
objects through the opposite end, the subtended angle is as 
much diminished as before it was enlarged, the objects are 
in the same ratio smaller, and also in the same ratio at a 
greater distance. It is not the intensity of the sensation or 
the sharpness of outline in the content, except as relatively 
in its own portions at the same time, for these may be 
exactly equal in the direct and the inverted spy-glass, but 
the constructing agency plots its distances and magnitudes 
from the angles which the objects subtend — the magnitudes 
directly, and the distances inversely. 

Relatively to figures > we have the following facts. 
When some medium for transmitting light gives the con- 
tent in the sensibility a reversed location in the sensation, 
the outlines of the content become, of course, transposed to 
opposite sides throughout the whole field of the sensation. 
The reversed representation of the object must so appear. 



192 THE SENSE IN ITS LAW. 

If, now, this object be a plane surface of homogeneous color 
throughout, the object as represented will appear as a plane, 
and though reversed as to its sides yet equable upon its sur- 
face. But if the object thus transmitted have characters, 
as letters or emblems, upon the surface, and these charac- 
ters are in relief, standing out from the plane as in a coin or 
medal, the object will not only appear reversed, but all the 
outlines of its characters also reversed, and the lights and 
shades of the reversed characters transposed to opposite 
sides. This induces a construction in attention which di- 
rectly reverses the characters in relief to engraved indenta- 
tions beneath the surface, and they so appear in perception. 
And if we substitute the die by which the coin was struck, 
with its figures as depressions from the surface, the revers- 
ing of the outlines of the lights and shades gives the condi- 
tions for constructing convexities and not concavities, and 
thus the characters are perceived to be standing out in relief 
upon the surface. The whole perception of figure is as the 
attending agency is conditioned, and thus leaping in all its 
facts within the same colligation of our hypothesis. 

And once more, only, when nature is exactly copied in 
these particulars as above by the painter, the content given 
in sense conditions the sensation to be constructed as in 
nature, and thus the objects perceived in the painting- 
appear as nature. We shall thus have this other remark- 
able consilience of all the facts of perspective and dioramic 
painting within our already very broad induction. The 
artist assumes a certain point, and arranges all his work in 
reference to it. The point in the painting is to be taken a3 
the stand-point for perceiving the objects in nature, and the 
picture through all its several portions is made to stand at 



THE CONSILIENCE OF FACTS. 193 

corresponding directions and angles from that point as in 
nature, and to receive such colors, and modifications of light 
and shade, and clearness or indistinctness of outline, as 
shall condition the like construction from the content given 
to the sensibility by the picture as would be given by the 
original designed to be represented. The quality upon the 
canvas is thus made to appear standing out as in space with 
all the fullness and life of reality. The rules of perspective 
painting are thus taken from nature, not in her real forms as 
in statuary and carving, but only in her colors and angular 
proportions and bearings from the stand-point. The painter 
learns to separate nature as she is, from that which is given 
of her as content in sensation, and puts upon his canvas that 
precisely which is the counterpart to the sensation, and 
passes by all which the intellectual agency constructs m 
nature, leaving that operation to be effected in the same 
way as in nature from the conditions in the picture. In 
proportion to its perfection, the painting puts the same con- 
tent in the sense as nature would, and the distinguishing 
and conjoining operations of the intellect give the' same 
qualities and forms to the consciousness, and thus- the pic- 
ture becomes the resemblance of nature. 

So, on the plane surface of his canvas the artist spreads 
out the conceptions of his genius before us. The sensibil- 
ity receives the content, and we observe and attend. The 
quality is distinguished, and the forms are conjoined. The 
light and shades through all the coloring,, and the figures, 
magnitudes and distances over all the extension, are thus 
together constructed in consciousness r and give the percep- 
tions in all their distinctness and definiteness, and, as a 
whole, the designed scene in all its completeness. Perhaps 

9 



194 THE SENSE IN ITS LAW. 

it is the interior of some magnificent temple; its massive 
architecture appears in all its grandeur, comprising long 
ranges of columns and broad and high arches, extended 
aisles, ascending stair- ways, and lofty galleries, with all their 
beautiful proportions. A throng of persons in all their va- 
riety of height and figure, of attitude and costume are seen 
to crowd its courts and porches, sit upon the benches, or 
walk over the tesselated pavements. With the single ex- 
ception of motion the canvas gives all that nature does ; 
or rather without exception, it gives all that nature does in 
one instant of the sensation, and the intellectual agency in 
its operation of distinction and conjunction puts within the 
light of consciousness the same appearance as would be 
conditioned by nature itself. The rules Of perspective, and 
of dioramie representation in art, are simply a transcript of 
the conditions in sensation for open vision. All the facts 
jump together into the same conclusion of our general law 
for perception, and both the consilience and the colligation 
of facts alike find their systematic arrangement and ade- 
quate explanation in our assumed ideal hypothesis. 

Perhaps it might now with safety be asserted, that no 
deduction of a general law from any induction of facts, 
could be more convincing, than that of the operation of dis- 
tinction and conjunction for all perception. As an inductive 
science, we might here affirm that we have an idea correla- 
tive to an actual law in the perceptions of the sense. 

But, our a priori investigation capacitates for a much 
higher ground of affirming this general law, than any induc- 
tion of facts can reach, however multiplied they may be. 
At the most they are yet partial, and can give only proba- 
bilities, not certainties, beyond the actual induction in the 



THE CONSILIENCE OF FACTS. 195 

experience. In our a priori conclusions we demonstrated 
necessity and universality for our idea. We found that 
only in accordance with its conditions was any perception of 
phenomena possible. When we now find this a priori idea 
to have its correlative in an actual law in the facts, we are 
fully warranted in affirming for this actual law a universal 
extension to all the facts of perception, upon the high 
ground of an already demonstrated necessity and universal- 
ity, and not merely as a deduction from a wide induction of 
particular facts. The a priori demonstration capacitates us 
to say, this actual law is so in the facts induced, not only ; 
and may be deduced as general law from this induction, not 
alone ; but much more than this, this actual law in the facts 
must have been as it is ; and it must extend to all the facts 
which any experience shall give in the perception of phe- 
nomena universally. We have a transcendental demonstra- 
tion of the universality of our law, as actually found in real 
colligation of facts. 

Here, then, we complete our science of Rational Psy- 
chology in reference to the Faculty of the Sense, We have 
attained its a priori Idea both for the pure and the empiri- 
cal intuition, and found it in this — that content must be 
given in sensation, and that this must be distinguished in 
its matter, and conjoined in its form, as conditional for all 
possible phenomena in perception. This a priori idea has 
not only been attained as pure thought, but we have as- 
sumed it hypothetically, and questioned actual experience 
largely under its direction, and have gathered a wide induc- 
tion of facts which are manifestly held in colligation by it, 
and from which it would be safe to make the deduction, 
that this law in the facts induced, as correlative with our 



190 THE SENSE IN ITS LAW, 

ideal hypothesis in which the facts have been bound up, is a 
general Law for all the further facts of perception that any 
experience may give to us. The correlation of idea and 
general law gives us in this a valid Inductive Science. But, 
inasmuch as all skepticism can not be thus excluded, be- 
cause the deduction of the law is yet from a partial induc- 
tion of. facts, and also because the law is still only a fact, 
we have gone much further than a mere deduction from the 
partial, and have given to this law actually attained, the a 
priori demonstration of necessity and universality, in which 
we have Transcendental Science. A valid science of per- 
ception in the sense is hereby attained, and we may from 
it not only perceive phenomena, but philosophically expound 
the process of perceiving. We not only may know as per- 
cipients of the phenomena know, but much more than this, 
we know how the perception is and must be effected. We 
know the appearance not only, but the knowing of that 
appearance. In this is science ; and from its a priori dem- 
onstration is transcendental science; and thus a rational, 
and not merely an empirical or inductive Psychology. 

Here our work as appropriate to the first Part, would 
be terminated, inasmuch as the Psychology of the sense 
is here completed ; but, as we have before indicated, the 
conclusions of Rational Psychology give the data for the 
demonstrations of Ontology ; and as such a process of 
demonstration is of great importance, and leads to most 
.interesting results in the determination of the valid being 
of the objects as known in that capacity which has been 
psychologically investigated, so we shall, in a separate form 
as an Appendix, give here an outline of the ontological de- 
monstration for the valid being of the objects — the phenom- 
ena inner and outer — as perceived in the faculty of the sense. 



APPENDIX TO THE SENSE 



AN ONTOLOGICAL DEMONSTEATION OF THE VALID BEING 
OF THE PHENOMENAL. 



The sense perceives, and perception is the apprehension 
of phenomena only. Internal phenomena as mental exer- 
cises and external phenomena as material qualities are appre- 
hended, but the subjects of the exercises and qualities can 
not be cognized by any functions of distinction and conjunc- 
tion. 

Moreover, all that the sense can apprehend is only in 
and for the percipient himself. The affection in sensation is 
in my sensibility, and the operations of distinction and con- 
junction are by my intellectual agency, and the phenomena 
distinguished and defined are for me only and not another, 
and as apprehended in the light of self-consciousness can 
permit no other percipient to commune with me in the 
same phenomena. "We must have other functions than 
those of the sense or any possible abstractions or combina- 
tions of sensible phenomena, before there can be any one 
field of objects as common to all. 

We are not here, therefore, to inquire for the valid being 
of that which is object to many, but only for that which is 
made object for "each one^ and we can not give the full 



198 APPENDIX TO THE SENSE. 

demonstration against the Materialist and the Idealist, until 
we have investigated the higher function of the understand- 
ing, and found the Idea and Law for the cognition of per- 
manent substances and perduring causes, The inquiry is 
solely to this point: are the phenomena valid appearances in 
my consciousness, or only phantoms ? And the demonstra- 
tion goes at once to the affirmative answer. 

I. Valid being of the inner phenomena. — Within the 
primitive intuition of space and time as solely a diversity 
of points and instants, we have found that an intellectual 
agency enters and constructs pure figures and periods. The 
whole work is within an immediate beholding in the light 
of consciousness, and all the relations and proportions of 
such constructions may be made intuitive demonstrations 
over the whole field of pure mathematics. The internal 
state is here affected solely through an inner agency, and 
yet it is really affected. The constructing, the intuitively 
beholding, and the mathematically demonstrating are as real 
phenomena in the inner sense as when a content in organic 
sensibility is discriminated and constructed. Although the 
forms are destitute of any organic content in sensation, yet 
the agency constructing is not a mere seeming but a verita- 
ble appearing in consciousness. Wholly irrespective of any 
outer impression, the inner mental phenomena have a con- 
scious valid being. 

It can not invalidate this to urge that previous impres- 
sions had been made upon the sensibility, and that the 
affected organ may make its own repetitions of forms and 
be the sole origin of the agency. Were there nothing but 
the organism acted on by outward impulses, the process of 
constructing forms would be wholly mechanical, and when 



VALID BEING OF THE PHENOMENAL. 199 

there was no impression from without then the organism 
must be quiescent. No mere organism could acquire spon- 
taneous self-activity from having once been put in operation 
by external appliances. And besides, the pure forms are 
more complete than any organic impressions can attain. 
The mathematical circle, or cone, or other figure, constructed 
from the scheme of a line revolving about one of the ends or 
a right-angled triangle about one of the sides subtending the 
right-angle, etc., are perfect. So also with the ideal con- 
structions of the sculptor and painter. What artist can 
make diagrams or pictures as perfect as his ideals ? No 
mechanical copy ever equals the pure ideal form. While, 
then, the pure but perfect forms only seem to be, the agency 
constructing truly appears, and as constructing agency is a 
valid phenomenon wholly independent of the organic sensa- 
tion. 

This same demonstration of valid inner phenomena is 
cumulative in two other applications of the constructing 
process. We have taken the sensibility as general and 
wholly vacant, and by an anticipation of content have found 
the process for distinguishing and defining all possible con- 
tent, and that process which through a prolepsis results in a 
determined act of distinction in reality, particularity, and 
peculiarity, is itself a veritable appearing in consciousness. 
And so also in actual perception, the impression upon the 
organic sensibility may be complete in the sensation, but in 
this alone no perception is effected. The content is yet a 
chaos for the consciousness except as intellectually elabora- 
ted into distinct quality and definite quantity, and the 
observing and attending agency is wholly mental, and the 
exercise fully in the consciousness, and thus truly appears. 



200 APPENDIX TO THE SENSE. 

Both the construction of possible and of actual content give 
the constructing exercises as valid. There is thus abundant 
proof for the valid being of the mental phenomena. 

II. Valid being of the outer phenomena, — We may, on 
the other hand, demonstrate the valid being of the external 
phenomena, and show that they are not made by the organ 
itself nor by the intellectual agency within working upon 
the organism. It is admitted that there are many occur- 
rences of illusory phenomena, fantastic and chimerical. So 
with dreams, and the hideous forms which haunt the inebri- 
ate in fits of delirium tremens, and the more questionable 
instances of ghost-seeing, Scottish second-sight, and mes- 
meric clairvoyance. There may be such mysterious seem- 
ing, where there is no real content in the sense as actually 
appearing. A vivid remembrance and spontaneous combi- 
nation of old impressions, strong emotions controlling the 
constructing faculty, or perhaps the reflex action of the in- 
tellect working, as it were, upon the back part of the sensi- 
bility, and projecting wild and unregulated forms forward 
for the consciousness, may account for most, if not perhaps 
for all such illusory visions. There are moreover the super- 
natural visions of inspired prophets and seers, where the 
content and construction were determined by a miraculous 
agency for revealing God's own purposes before the actual 
events. All such cases evince that there may be seeming 
visions and voices where no organic content is present. 
The skeptic may use such occurrences as data for conclud- 
ing against the validity of any phenomena. But while we 
may admit all such instances of fantastic or miraculous ap- 
pearance, and allow that they can be only an objectifying 
of our own inner agency, or of some miraculously spiritual 



VALID BEING OF THE PHENOMENAL. 201 

agency working in us, yet can no amount of such cases at 
all disturb the positive demonstrations we may here make 
for valid objective phenomena. 

Aside from all such morbid or manifestly abnormal per- 
ceptions, we have the vastly preponderating amount of our 
organic perceptions in a manner that can be tested and their 
content clearly determined. By careful reflection, we can 
consciously detect the agency discriminating and conjoining 
a content that we can neither make nor unmake. We may 
turn away or obstruct the organ, and then the content can 
be neither retained nor anew supplied. We can again fitly 
direct the organ, and the content can neither be prevented 
nor expelled. We can consciously distinguish and construct 
this content, but can do this in no other way than according 
to its own determining conditions. In our anticipation of 
a content, this may be as we please, and the form may be 
constructed as we choose, but such arbitrary constructions 
can never be made other than empty ideals in the conscious- 
ness ; while with our organic content distinguished and de- 
fined, we can never abolish the consciousness that it has a 
real appearance, nor make it to put on for us a mere ideal 
seeming to be. There are, therefore, objective phenomena, 
valid and wholly independent of all subjective production. 
We thus demonstrate the phenomena of the sense to be 
both of the internal and external senses, and thus that there 
are phenomena which may be known as some, mental, and 
some, material. What the mind and the matter themselves 
are we can not here determine, for we have the psychology 
as yet only for perceiving phenomena, not at all for cogniz- 
ing substances and agents. 

That our knowledge begins in perception, and that our 
9* 



202 APPENDIX TO THE SENSE. 

perceptions attain valid phenomena, may thus be demon- 
strated ; but that any thing other than phenomenal, and that 
within our subjective sphere, can be real, the sense has no 
data for proving. How beings without our organs may 
know, we can not here determine. They could not have in 
consciousness heat and cold, sweet and bitter, fragrant and 
fetid smells, and must know them, if at all, wholly without 
their own experience ; as Omniscience must l^now what re- 
morse to us is without His own experience of it. 

This phenomenal world of inner exercises and outer 
qualities, though single, isolated, and fleeting in all its per- 
ceived objects, and wholly in a perpetual flow, is yet a world 
of reality, and not mere dreams nor ideal semblances. The 
actual content in sensation distinguishes all phenomena in 
perception from spectral illusions, mental hallucinations, or 
credulous clairvoyance. It is knowledge valuable for its 
own sake, and worth more for the use hereafter to be made 
of it. Its full explanation is science begun, a first and nec- 
essary step toward science completed. Other and higher 
objects remain to be attained, but the higher are beyond at- 
tainment except as we avail ourselves of these here given. 
In this philosophy of the Sense, the door opens to more 
spacious and more splendid apartments, but we may by no 
means enter except through this fore-court of the Temple 
of Science. 



PART II. 

THE UNDERSTANDING 



I. 



THE NECESSITY FOR A HIGHER INTELLECTUAL AGENCY 
THAN ANY >IN THE SENSE. 

Perception in the sense gives to us phenomena in real 
appearance, and not as mere fantastic illusion. But such 
phenomena are in the sense necessarily fleeting, isolated, arid 
standing wholly in one self. The discriminating agency dis- 
tinguishes only the content given in the sensibility, and 
which is a perpetual coming and departing : the construct- 
ing agency conjoins this distinct content as quality sepa- 
rately, and thus in one form of its quality only as definite 
object at once ; and all this only for the self, in whose con- 
sciousness this distinguishing and conjoining operation is 
carried on. Each phenomenon must thus occupy its own 
space and its own time in the self-consciousness ; its appear- 
ance disjoined from all -other phenomena, its place from all 
other places, and its period from all other periods, and the 
self-consciousness, in which the appearance, place, and period 
are, disjoined from every other self. From the very func- 
tions of the sense in their law of operation, it must be 



204 THE UNDERSTANDING. 

wholly impracticable that it should give any thing other 
than definite phenomena, definite places, and definite peri- 
ods, as single parts of nature, space, and time, and can pos- 
sibly know nothing of any connection of these parts, as the 
components of one whole. All parts are to the sense defi- 
nite totals, and the conception of a universe of nature, and a 
oneness of all space and of all time, is from any agency in 
the sense wholly impracticable. One phenomenon has gone 
when another has come, and its place and period came and 
went with it, and the conjunctions in the departed have no 
connection to the conjunctions in the becoming ; and thus, 
neither phenomena, places, nor periods, take hold of each 
other in their arising and departing in the consciousness, 
nor connect themselves into one nature, one space, or one 
time. 

As in the perceiving self there can be no such whole of 
all phenomena, of all space, and of all time, much more 
must it be impracticable for the sense to give to different 
perceiving selves a participation in the same one whole of 
nature, of space, and of time ; inasmuch as neither self can 
have a whole of nature, space and time not only, but neither 
self can at all participate in any other's definite phenomena, 
places, and periods. In the sense, each one perceives for 
himself, and his phenomenon, figure in space, and period in 
time, are each his own only, and in which none other may 
participate. How come we, then, by such conceptions as 
one whole of all nature of which all definite phenomena are 
its parts, one whole of all space of which all definite places are 
but its parts, and one whole of all time of which all definite 
periods are but its parts ? Certainly by no functions of the 
sense. The operation of conjunction defines its object only 



HIGHER FACULTY THAN SENSE NECESSARY. 205 

so far as the conjunction in unity is carried, and then comes 
a hiatus separating the next conjunction in unity from 
it, whether of appearance, place, or time. If I construct a 
circle in the pure intuition, I know it as distinct from a 
triangle, as occupying a space, and as continuing a period ; 
but when that constructed circle has departed from the pure 
intuition, and I now construct a triangle in pure intuition, 
while I know the triangle as distinct from a circle and as 
having place and period, yet do I not know this triangle and 
that circle as having any connection with each other in 
themselves, their place, or their period. The circle, in its 
conception, place, and period, has altogether departed ; the 
triangle, in its conception, place, and period, has come in ; 
and a chasm, which no construction by a conjunction in 
unity can bridge over, separates them ; and my intuition 
can not determine that the conceived circle and triangle, 
and their places and periods, have each with each any con- 
nection. The being of the circle is gone, the place it occu- 
pied is gone, and the period it filled is gone ; and that the 
conceived triangle now come, and its place, and its period, 
have any connection in a whole of all conceived being and 
of all space and of all time with the conceived circle in its 
departed being, and place, and period, the intuition can have 
no possible functions for determining. And so, precisely, 
with the relation of a departed and a becoming phenomenon. 
The redness and its place and its period have all departed, 
and a whiteness in its place and period is now in its becom- 
ing ; but for the sense there is a chasm of nihility between 
the two, and an impossibility of saying that the redness and 
the whiteness are connected in one whole of nature, their 
places in one whole of all space, and their periods in one 



206 THE UNDERSTANDING. 

whole of all time. To the sense, every definite construction 
of a phenomenon in place and period, stands only in its own 
isolation. It can construct definite phenomena, in their dis- 
tinct quality, into different figures and periods definitely ; but 
it can only construct, and from one construction to another 
it can give no connection. Its definite phenomena it can 
not connect into one universe of nature ; its definite places, 
into one whole of space ; nor its definite periods, into one 
whole of time. Each intellect in self-consciousness must 
construct its own phenomena, and these will be perpetually 
departing and utterly disjoined from the becoming; and 
thus to no self-consciousness can there be in the sense any 
connection into one whole of nature, of space, and of time, 
nor can one self-consciousness in its constructions commune 
with any other self in its constructions. Were there no 
higher functions than the sense, phenomena in their places 
and periods would be a mere rhapsody of becoming and 
departing constructions, and in such a hap-hazard dance of 
appearances, that all conception of a connected whole of 
nature, of space, and of time, would be an impossibility. In 
order that we may know other than isolated phenomena in 
their separate places and periods, a higher faculty than that 
of conjunction in sense is necessary. 



FACULTY OF UJfDEESTANDING E XPL A I NE D . 207 



II 



THE EXPOSITION OF THIS HIGHER AGENCY AS 
UNDERSTANDING. 

The intellectual agency gives two different kinds of rela- 
tions in the consciousness. One kind is that which has 
already been considered in the sense as the operation of con- 
junction. The diverse elements are taken in their manifold- 
ness and conjoined in unity, so that they stand together 
within limits and become a total, and the bond which holds 
them in unity, is both different from, and external to, the ele- 
ments themselves. The elements are brought into juxta- 
position, and make a whole as an aggregate simply, and 
thus the relation is one of collocation only. When I con- 
struct a triangle in pure intuition, I merely conjoin the 
diversity within external limits, and the area of the triangle 
becomes a whole, simply in virtue of this external defining 
of the diverse points contained within the limits. So also 
in the construction of any phenomenon in its form, the same 
relationship of collocation only is effected. The content in 
the sensibility, as color in vision, is conjoined in attention, 
and thereby defined in its figure, and thus becomes a defi- 
nite whole as colored surface placed within outer limits. Of 
this kind are all the relations of the sense, pure or empirical, 
inasmuch as the operation of conjunction can effect no other 
relationships, and this is the only operation in the sense 
which may give any relations. These may be termed 
Mathematical relations. 

Another kind of relationship is that where the elements 



208 THE UNDERSTANDING. 

are held together by an inherent bond, and all coalesce in one 
whole, and which is thus not a mere aggregation and rela- 
tionship of collocation, but a relationship of coalition. All 
the parts are reciprocally inter-dependent, and together con- 
stitute an organic total. Thus with the whole plant or ani- 
mal, the elements are not merely together in a mass, but 
there is an inner bond in which they all grow together. 
The union is not local or periodical, but dynamical : and as 
distinguished from the former, we may term this kind Phil- 
osophical relations. 

A Judgment is a determined relationship between two 
or more cognitions, one of which qualifies and is predicate, 
the other of which is qualified and is subject. When in the 
possession of one cognition I can by an analysis take the 
other cognition from it, and predicate this latter of the 
former, it is an Analytical Judgment. Thus of the cogni- 
tion of a line, I need only an analysis of what is already 
contained in the cognition and I shall find the further cogni- 
tions of extension, divisibility, etc., and which I can predi- 
cate of the former cognition and say at once in an Analyti- 
cal Judgment, the line is extended ; is divisible, etc. The 
validity of such judgments is determined in the clearness of 
the analysis itself. It does not add anything to our knowl- 
edge, for we have only that in the judgment which we 
already possessed in the original cognition ; but the separate 
analysis has made the original cognition more clear, although 
it has thus been not at all extended. 

When, in some way other than from the cognition 
already possessed, I attain a new cognition in a determined 
relationship to a given one, and thus add something new as 
predicate of an old cognition, it is a Synthetical Judgment ; 



FACULTY OF UNDERSTANDING EXPLAINED. 209 

and in this the cognition is extended over more than its 
former ground. Thus the cognition of a phenomenon as 
color may not only be analyzed, and hence in an Analytical 
Judgment it may be affirmed that the color has place, has 
shape, has divisibility, etc., but that which no analysis can 
get from it, a further observation in experience may find as 
new and add to it, and thus affirm in a Synthetical Judg- 
ment, that the color is changed in its intensity, its place, its 
shape ; or it is in motion, is blended with the other colors, 
or is faded away, etc. The validity of this form of a Judg- 
ment depends wholly upon the valid attainment of the new 
cognition. 

And precisely in this validity of the attainment of the 
new cognition to be predicated in a judgment as qualifying 
the old, as it differs in evidence between the Mathematical 
and the Philosophical relation, is the importance and neces- 
sity of the exposition of this higher agency as an under- 
standing. Mathematical relationships are given in the con- 
structions of the sense, and the operation of conjunction can 
give only such relations. The construction being effected, 
the relation of all particulars in the diagram stand open in 
the consciousness to an immediate beholding, and the new 
cognition for an Extended Judgment is thus a direct intui- 
tion. The specific relation which exposes the new cognition, 
is seen in the construction ; and thus the synthetic judg- 
ment is manifestly valid. If I construct a circle in pure in- 
tuition, the relation of its radii is immediately seen in the 
construction itself, and the new conception of equality thus 
attained is legitimately added in a synthetic judgment ; and 
so with all possible mathematical relations, whether pure or 
empirical. The process is synthetical, viz., the adding of 



210 THE UNDERSTANDING. 

some new cognition in a judgment through all the process ; 
but this new cognition is always attained, in an immediate 
intuition in the constrtbetion itself. An exact definition 
gives occasion for an affirmation of the exact relationship, 
and the same for a phenomenon in its empirical form as in a 
pure form in the primitive intuition. The judgment, though 
synthetical, is also intuitive. 

But this can not so be effected in philosophical relations. 
The new cognition is not one that admits of becoming at 
all an immediate intuition. There can be no construction 
effected in which it may be seen. I may construct the form 
of two colors in space, and in the construction see all the 
relations in space of the two phenomena, and thus affirm 
that one is square and the other is circular, one is without 
or within, above or below, larger or smaller, etc., and in time 
earlier or later, of longer or shorter continuance, etc., than 
the other. But I can not so construct any two phenomena, 
as to see in the construction that they both inhere in one 
ground, or that both originate in one source. The new con- 
ception is of an inner bond which will not allow of any con- 
struction, and can not thus become intuition. That in which 
the phenomena coalesce, and by virtue of which they are 
held in one whole, is altogether supersensual, inasmuch as it 
is wholly beyond the conditions of any conjunction in unity. 
That the redness and the smoothness are in one place and 
period, may be affirmed from the sight and the touch, and a 
construction may be made to represent them externally, by 
a painting ; but that they inhere in one ground as their sub- 
ject, which we call a rose, we can not make to be immedi- 
ate intuition, because no construction can possibly give this 
supersensuous ground, or common subject, to be immedi- 



FACULTY OF UNDERSTANDING EXPLAINED, 211 

ately seen. That the phenomenon of heat, and that of 
evaporation, have a relation in their periods, and what that 
relation is, may be affirmed from a construction in the sense 
intuitively ; but that they are connected as source and con- 
sequence, by an inner bond of causality, can not be an intu- 
ition of the sense, inasmuch as no construction can possibly 
give this to be immediately seen. Philosopical relations are 
altogether of this supersensuous kind, and their inner bond, 
through which all coalesces in the unity of a whole, is be- 
yond the practicability of any construction. The forms of 
space and time can have nothing in which it may be repre- 
sented. 

The philosophical relation always involves a new cogni- 
tion, which can not be attained by any analysis of the phe- 
nomena that are held in relationship by it, and thus the 
judgment is always synthetic. That the two phenomena 
are affirmed to be thus related is by reason only of this in- 
ner supersensual bond, and the adding of this in the judg- 
ment is an extension of the cognition, and as it is thus no 
product of an analysis, and as before seen is no possible in- 
tuition in any construction, it must somehow be attained in 
its own peculiar manner, and demand that for it a peculiar 
function should be supplied, other than any thing which the 
faculty of the sense can give. As conjunction only puts 
together in collocation, while this gives internally a coali- 
tion ; the first a collection, this a connection ; I shall so dis- 
tinguish it as the operation of connection. And as the 
intellect conjoins in the sense, so its connecting agency be- 
longs to the faculty of the understanding. This faculty of 
the understanding, as that which gives the relations of phe- 
nomena in their inherent grounds and sources, and thus 



212 THE FKDEESTANDING. 

from being conjoined into isolated qualities they become 
known as connected into existing things, it is now our busi- 
ness fully to investigate. By this distinction of operation, 
as connecting and not constructing agent, we have wholly 
separated it from the faculty of the sense already examined, 
and in this isolation of being, the claim is, that we attain an 
a priori cognition of how it is possible that such an opera- 
tion of connection may be effected, and thus how an under- 
standing must be regulated in its functions if it is to have 
any synthetic judgments of philosophical relations, and this 
will give the understanding in its Idea. It will then be 
necessary in another Chapter, to attain in the facts a Law 
in actual operation, the precise correlative to this a priori 
idea, in which we shall have a valid science of the Under- 
standing, as before of the Sense. We may then use these 
conclusions for an Ontological Demonstration of the valid 
being of the objects given in the Understanding. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS SUBJECTIVE 
IDEA. 



SECTION I. 

THE UNDERSTANDING NECESSARILY DISCURSIVE. 

Conjunction gives definite form in space and time, and 
thus all conception of its products is of that which is 
brought directly under an intuition either pure or empirical. 
But such products can have no . other relationship to each 
other in our knowledge, than that which belongs to the 
forms of space and time. They may be conjoined in space 
or time, but can not thus be known as connected in their 
own internal being. A dynamical connection can not be 
constructed, and can not, therefore, be accurately defined ; 
it can admit only of a description which shall suggest, not 
of a definition which shall make to appear. The bond 
which constitutes the relation is thought as inherent in the 
cognition related, and thus while the related cognitions are 
constructed, the bond as their inherent connective is not and 
can not be constructed, but is a new cognition of a very 
peculiar kind. Thus two billiard balls may be constructed 
in space, and the meeting of the one in motion with the 
other at rest and the consequent displacement of the latter 
may be constructed in time, and the point in space and in 



21 4 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

time of their actual contact may be given in an intuition by 
the construction ; but all this will not in the least serve to 
give the cognition of the dynamical bond, which we may 
in this case call impulse, that inherently connects the im- 
pinging of the first and the displacement of the last 
together. This cognition of impulse, here, is not only new 
numerically, but quite new generically ; the cognition of the 
balls, and their contact, and their antecedent and conse- 
quent motion, all admitting of a construction and thus of an 
accurate definition in the immediate intuition, but the cog- 
nition of impulse not at all admitting of such construction, 
definition, and direct intuition. It can only be thought, not 
perceived. 

Precisely thus, with all connection as ground / it can no 
more be constructed, than can the connection of impulse 
above given as source of the displacement of the second 
ball. The form of the whiteness and that of the hardness 
of the ivory ball may be constructed in the vision and the 
touchy and both may bo referred to the same place and the 
same period intuitively > and thus a definite conception of 
their relationship in space and time may be attained, but 
this will not at all serve to give the common ground in 
which both the whiteness and the hardness inhere, and 
which gives to them the relations of qualities in one thing. 
This last is a cognition as connection, and not at all as con- 
junction ; it is only thought, it can not be perceived. It 
belongs wholly to the understanding in its work of connec- 
tion, and can not be attained by the sense in its work of 
eonj unction. 

And now, to distinguish this cognition of the bond a3 
product of the operation of connection from the product in 



THE UNDERSTANDING DISCURSIVE. 215 

the operation of conjunction, we must appropriate an exclu- 
sive term. The whiteness and hardness, the motion, con- 
tact, and displacement of the billiard balls we call phenom- 
ena, because they are made to immediately appear in a defi- 
nite construction. They may differ as quality connected in 
their ground, and as event connected in their source ; but all 
are alike phenomena, inasmuch as each is made to appear, 
and all are given in the sense. The antithetic term to phe- 
nomenon, from the same Greek language, would be noitme- 
non y but as this has been much less familiarly incorporated 
into the English language we shall, at the expense of deriv- 
ation from another tongue, take an equivalent term for this 
antithesis from the Latin notio, and call this new conception 
which the understanding in its work of connection can alone 
supply, Notion. This is to have its exclusive application in 
this work to this specific cognition — the bond of relation- 
ship as product of connection ; and never to be applied to 
any product of conjunction. Thus we shall not say a notion 
of hardness, whiteness, motion, contact, displacement, etc., 
all of which come under the term phenomenon ; but we 
shall say a notion of the ground, source, etc., for the con- 
nection of phenomena. Phenomena will be conjoined by 
phenomena, but can be connected only by the notion. The 
phenomenon is wholly in the sense, the notion is wholly in 
the understanding. 

The notion, as supplied in the understanding, is put un- 
der the phenomena as substratum in which they inhere, or 
as source on which they depend ; and, as it is a peculiar 
operation of the intellect which receives this notion, and 
makes it to stand under the phenomena as their connection, 
so this function of the intellect, as faculty for connection, 



216 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

is appropriately termed the understanding. The same intel- 
lect conjoins the diversity — and this is the faculty of the 
sense — which connects the phenomena — and this is the fac- 
ulty of the understanding. 

This connecting of phenomena in their grounds and 
sources by the understanding is the act of thinking, and the 
product should be termed a philosophical or a logical judg- 
ment, distinguishing it from the process of conjoining in 
unity, which is the act of attending, and the product of 
Avhich, as intuitively affirmed, is a mathematical judgment. 
Both are synthetic, inasmuch as both attain a new cognition 
in which the relationship is given ; but in one case, as the 
mathematical, the new cognition is attained by an immediate 
intuition in a construction ; and in the other, the philosophi- 
cal, the new cognition can not be constructed and thus can- 
not be intuition, but is wholly supplied as thought or notion 
in the understanding. This connecting of phenomena in 
their notion is pare thinking, when the phenomena are not 
given in the sense, but are merely the conceptions of phen- 
omena by a prolepsis or anticipation purely mental. The 
whole work is thus entirely intellectual. The anticipated 
content is constructed in the sense when there is no actual 
sensation, and is thus a conceived phenomenon only ; and 
the notion, as connective, is wholly supplied in the under- 
standing as pure conception also ; and thus the whole pro- 
cess, though combining both intellectual conjunction and in- 
tellectual connection, is wholly a mental conception and 
therefore pure thinking. Empirical thinking is when real 
phenomena are thought as connected in their grounds or 
sources. This last is properly experience — the connecting 
of our perceived phenomena in their notions, as their ground 



THE UNDERSTANDING DISCURSIVE. 217 

or source of being. When phenomena are thought as con- 
nected in their ground, the product is called a thing ; when 
as connected in their source, the product is an event ; and 
when both thing and event are conceived simply as origina- 
ted being, they axe facts (facta, res gestce). 

This connecting of things and events may go on indefi- 
nitely, and when it is pure thinking, the whole product is a 
train of thought / when empirical thinking, it is an order 
of experience. This thinking in judgments in the under- 
standing, it is manifest can never be made intuitive. The 
phenomenal cognitions may be constructed in their conjunc- 
tions of space and time, and their relationship of conjunc- 
tion be intuitively apprehended ; but the notional cognition 
can not be constructed, nor intuitively seen in any construc- 
tion, and thus the relationship of connection can not be in- 
tuitively apprehended. We can never so construct the 
whiteness and the hardness of the billiard ball as intuitively 
to see the ground in which they are connected, nor so con- 
struct the impinging and the displacing as intuitively to see 
the source in one out of which the other springs. Our con- 
struction of the whiteness and hardness may give the round- 
ness in space, and we may thus call it a ball ; but this is 
still only quality and not ground. The qualities of white- 
ness and hardness and roundness are all thought as in one 
and the same ground, which we call ivory ; but this ground, 
called ivory, is wholly supplied as a notion, and not at all as 
an intuition. So also, our construction of the impinging 
and the displacing may give succession in time, and we may 
thus call one antecedent and the other consequent, and the 
whole in combination sequence; but this also is still event, 
not source. The events of impinging, and displacing, and 

10 



218 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

their sequence, are all thought as in one point of connection, 
which is a source that we here call impulse ; but this source, 
called impulse, is wholly supplied in the understanding as a 
notion, and not in the sense as an intuition. So must it ever 
be in all thinking in the understanding, that the connective 
in the judgment can never be supplied by a construction 
and can thus never be made an intuition. The difference 
between the mathematical judgment that a straight line is 
the shortest that may be drawn between two points, and 
the philosophical judgment that the whiteness and hardness 
are qualities of the ivory, or that the displacement of the 
second ball by the first was from impulse, is at once palpa- 
ble. In the first, as mathematical judgment, we construct 
the cognitions and we intuitively see in our construction the 
new cognition of relationship, which we name the shortest ; 
but in the other, we can possibly make no construction that 
shall give intuitively the new cognition of relationship which 
we name the ivory as ground, or the impulse as source ; and 
from which connectives only can we form our philosophical 
judgment. 

In the philosophical judgment, we are obliged to receive 
the notion in the understanding, and then the relationship is 
always apprehended only by a discwsus through that no- 
tion ; and thus the judgment is necessarily discursive, not 
intuitive. "We go from the whiteness to the hardness, in 
our connecting of these as qualities in a thing, through the 
notion of ivory as common substratum ; and we go from 
the impinging to the displacing, in our connecting of these 
as events, through the notion of impulse as source in the 
antecedent for the origination of the consequent. The judg- 
ment can only be formed from the process of connection ; 



THE UNDEBSTANDING DISCURSIVE. 219 

and the connection can only be made in the notion ; and the 
notion is supplied by no possible intuition. We can thus 
connect, i. e., think in the understanding, in no other possi- 
ble manner than discursively. The understanding is faculty 
only for connecting, not for constructing ; for thinking, not 
for attending ; for discursively concluding, not for intuitively 
beholding. It attains philosophical or logical judgments, 
not mathematical axioms. Its judgments are truly depend- 
ent upon an a priori cognition, and are conditional for all 
experience. That I have the sensation of warmth may be 
given in the sense, and when, and how much ; but all this 
will be isolated sensation and not connected experience, 
except as I can connect that sensation with other sensa- 
tions in their common grounds and sources, and say the 
sun or the fire warms me. But in order to such judg- 
ment in experience that the sun warms me, I must assume 
the notions of both ground and source, and, discursively, 
through these conclude upon the judgment in experience. 
The experience does not and can not give the notion ; the 
notion is conditional for the connected experience. 

That the notion is conditional for all experience, as a 
connection of the phenomena into things, should be fully 
apprehended, and may be very conclusively determined. 
Thus, I may have the definite and distinct qualities of a 
hardness, a coldness, a brittleness, a transparency, etc., as 
real phenomena in perception, but they are all necessarily, 
separate from each other as given in perception, and no con- 
junction can go any further than to give to each its com- 
plete form as phenomenon, and let them stand singly and 
separately in the consciousness. But when the understand. 
ing has its notion of a ground common • to them all, the 



220 THE UNDEESTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

thinking may then connect them all in it by a discursus 
from one to another through it, and give to this notion as 
connective ground a name as thing, and of which the phen- 
omena will all be held in a judgment as common properties 
or qualities, and I may then say, the Ice is hard, is cold, etc. 
My perception in the sense has given the phenomena only ; 
my thinking in the understanding has given me all the sepa- 
rate phenomena to be connected in one thing ; but such a 
judgment that the one thing — Ice — contained in itself all 
these phenomena as its qualities, and which is essential to a 
proper experience of such qualities, could not be attained 
except I had first assumed this notion of a common ground, 
through which to make my discursus in thinking the phenom- 
ena respectively to inhere in it. So, in the same manner I may 
perceive the phenomena of a liquidness, limpidness, fluidity, 
etc., and by a supplied notion as ground I may connect them 
as the properties of one thing and call it water ; and then 
again, I may perceive the phenomena of volatility, expansi- 
bility, elasticity, etc., and connect them in a common ground 
in the understanding and call it vapor ; and as the result, I 
shall have the three things with their respective qualities, as 
ice, water, and vapor. Neither of these things could have 
been given in a connected experience, but only the phenom- 
ena singly in perception, except as the understanding had 
been supplied with their notional connectives, and thought 
them in a judgment discursively thereby. 

But, still further, with these three things distinct in a 
judgment of experience, I may proceed in the understand- 
ing and supply a higher notional connective as common source 
for them all, and think these three things to have succes- 
sively come out of one and the same material substance, 



THE UNDERSTANDING DISCURSIVE. 221 

which has now been ice, and now water, and now vapor, 
and thus on through all possible changes. But it is mani- 
fest that no such connection in this comprehensive judgment 
of an experience could have been effected except as first this 
higher notional, as common source, had been supplied in the 
understanding. And thus ever, in all our judgments of ex- 
perience, whether more or less comprehensive, the experi- 
ence does not give the connection, but the connection pro- 
duces the judgment of experience, and this rests wholly 
upon a supplied notional in the understanding. No possi- 
ble thinking in discursive judgments can be effected, and 
thus no experience can be, except through the use of a 
notion supplied in the understanding. The judgment can- 
not be in the sense, for the sense can not supply the notional, 
nor make the discursive connection through it ; but the judg- 
ment is according to the sense, for it must be the connection 
of only such phenomena as are given in the sense. We 
may thus say of the understanding, that it is a higher fac- 
ulty than the sense, but though transcending the sense, it 
yet is a faculty judging according to the sense. It connects 
only what is first given in the sense. 



SECTION II. 



SPACE AND TIME THE NECESSARY MEDIA FOR DETERMINING 
CONNECTION THROUGH A DISCURSUS. 

Thinking is the intellectual operation of connecting the 
cognitions supplied in the sense through the cognitions sup- 
plied in the understanding. The sense-cognitions are of the 



222 THE UNDERSTANDING IT ITS IDEA, 

phenomenal, the understanding-cognitions are of the no- 
tional. The intellectual process is ever from one sense-cog- 
nition to another by a discursus through an understanding- 
cognition, and the judgment resulting is wholly synthetical 
— adding the necessary connection of the phenomenal in the 
notional — and thereby giving universality to the ultimate 
judgment, as that all phenomena must stand in some ground, 
or must originate in some source. And the great question 
is — how verify this synthesis ? How show that the addi- 
tion .of the notional as necessary and universal connective in 
such judgments is valid ? All experience and all inductive 
science rest alike upon such synthetic judgments, and the 
former is wholly an illusion, and the latter a mere straining 
of speculations through a fictitious notional which can leave 
in the sieve only an empty ideal, except as this whole pro- 
cess of thinking in judgments may receive an a priori deter- 
mination. 

If Ave attempt to explain such necessary connection, as 
did Hume, through the frequency of observation in experi- 
ence, and thus that habit only induces the conviction of neces- 
sary connection, we leave the judgment to rest upon mere 
credulity ; and all experience and all philosophical science 
stand upon no firmer basis than " a belief" engendered in 
" custom." If we say with Brown, that there are only the 
phenomena in a certain " invariable order of sequences," 
and that all conviction of necessary connection is from the 
constitution of the human mind alone, which is so made 
that by a ceaseless and infallible prophecy it simply foretells 
the coming of the consequent in the appearance" of the ante- 
cedent, we leave again all validity to experience and induc- 
tive science wholly amid the mysteries of this constitutional 



MEDIA FOE DETERMINING A DISCUESUS. 223 

and instinctive prophesying. To take, with Reid, this neces- 
sary connection as the mere dictum of common sense, and 
make this an ultimate fact in which all experience and all 
philosophy must begin and back of which no investigation 
can reach, is to admit at once that experience and philosophy 
have only an assumed original, and that neither can possibly 
return back and examine the source in which it originates, 
nor expel the bane of skepticism from either the fountain 
or its streams. 

When we have demonstrated the reality of the phenom- 
ena by our foregoing a priori process, still all the above 
methods of accounting for the conviction of the necessary 
connection of the phenomena leaves the whole as a mere 
matter of credulity or assumption, and no thinking can ter- 
minate in a judgment that shall have any higher validity 
than mere opinion. The roundness, whiteness, hardness, 
etc., are veritable phenomena ; but that they are all con- 
nected by an inherence in one notion as their ground, and 
which we call " ivory," and are thus qualities in one thing, 
we may believe or hold as opinion but can never determine. 
The motion of one ball, and its contact with another, and 
the retardation in the first and displacement of the last ball 
are real phenomena ; but that the retardation* and displace- 
ment are connected in one source with the motion and the 
contact which precede them, and which as connective notion 
we call " impulse," and thus that they are events held toge- 
ther by one agency, we may believe or opine, but we can 
never know. And all philosophy founded upon any induc- 
tion of such facts, however broadly and carefully made, 
must also alike rest only upon mere opinion. We are in this 
position utterly precluded from all power of reply to that 



224 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

skeptic who shall affirm that he has examined all these 
sources of a necessary connection, and has satisfied himself 
that their whole induced conviction is a mere mist and fog- 
bank deceptively rising over a stagnant understanding, and 
which is utterly dissipated in thin air whenever the sunlight 
strikes upon it from above, or the ebb and flow of active 
thought agitates it from beneath. But, surely, the interest 
in the human mind for science, and the intellectual yearning 
for established truth will never permit an acquiescence in such 
desponding conclusions, until skepticism has itself become a 
demonstration ; and the only truth found to be this, that 
man can verify no truth ; and that the only foundation for 
science is at last seen to be self-contradiction and absurdity. 
The success in our a priori investigation of the sense, 
and our complete exposition of the operation of conjunction, 
should encourage to the same effort and anticipated result 
in the field of the understanding and the a priori explica- 
tion of the operation of connection, and under the influence 
of so well grounded a hope the attempt to realize it should 
not be easily abandoned. We are not to take the under- 
standing-cognition upon trust, nor merely because we need 
it as our connective conditional for all possible thinking, and 
which can give for philosophy no other basis than an un- 
verified empiricism : nor are we to assume it merely as the 
condition and law of our subjective thinking, and thereby 
attain those splendid ideal systems of nature, the soul, 
and God, which have so highly distinguished the great mas- 
ters of modern German Metaphysics ; but which, denying 
any thing as legitimately in the possession of philosophy 
beyond the subjective process itself, have only issued, and 
for the future ever must only issue, in the emptiness of an 



MEDIA FOR DETERMINING A D I S C U R S U S . 225 

entirely misnamed Rationalism, and which at last is nothing 
else than the absurdity of a transcendental Pantheism. 
Subjective thinking and an objective experience differ not in 
this, that the sense-cognitions are not connected through 
the understanding-cognitions, for this is conditional for any 
connecting in discursive judgments whatever ; but they dif- 
fer in this, that in subjective thinking the intellectual opera- 
tion of connection creates its own judgments within the 
self, and only for the self who thinks them, while in objec- 
tive experience the whole process and its result in a judg- 
ment is conditioned by somewhat already existing other 
than the self, and the determination of this other existence 
in the judgment makes it to be objective to the self, and 
competent in the same way to be object to any other self 
possible. One gives wholly an ideal, the other an actual 
thing in tha judgment. And, here the task which we are to 
accomplish lies directly before us, viz., that we attain the 
operation of connection itself in its primitive elements so 
completely, that we may determine how, and how only, an 
objective experience is possible. In this will be attained 
the entire functions of an understanding in its possibility, 
and will thus be the understanding in its Idea after which 
we are seeking. 

Sufficient has already been said to show that no deter- 
mination of connection can be reached through an intuitive 
process. The judgment is inclusive of somewhat not admit- 
ting of construction, and thus not possible to be brought 
under an immediate beholding. Conjunction is restricted to 
the field of the sense, and can by no means project itself 
within the field of the understanding, and thus it is utterly 
impracticable that an intuitive passage should ever be 

10* 



226 THE UNDEES TAN DING IN ITS IDEA. 

opened between them. Connection is wholly another work 
than conjunction, and intuitive affirmations wholly other 
cognitions than discursive judgments. No exposition nor 
use of the former can be of any significancy in determining 
the latter. The sense can not think nor give any exposition 
of the process of thinking. Conjunction which is for the 
sense, simply brings into collocation / connection, which is 
for thought in the understanding, requires an intrinsic coa- 
lition. One is function for cognizing juxtaposition, the 
other for cognizing an inherent concretion. 

Since, therefore, all attempt of an a priori exposition by 
an intuitive process is wholly excluded, the alternative must 
be to take some media, if such may be found, by which it 
may discursively be determined how such objective connec- 
tion may be ; or which is the same thing, how an objective 
experience is possible. Such media must be common to 
both our subjective constructions of phenomena in the sense 
and our objective connection of them in an experience, or 
they can afford no occasion for a discursus from one to the 
other and consequently no determination of any connection 
having been effected between them. They must, moreover, 
be a priori conditional for both subjective construction and 
objective connection in an experience, inasmuch as our de- 
termination of such connection in experience is to be wholly 
a priori, and thus necessarily conditional for all objective 
connection. Only in such manner can any connection in an 
objective experience be possible. And now, such media 
may be found in Space and Time. We have already seen 
that all definite phenomena must have their definite place 
and their definite period, and thus that all construction of 
phenomena must be in a space and a time ; all subjective 



A NOTIONAL NECESSAEY TO EXPERIENCE. 227 

constructions thus must have a space and a time. On the 
other hand, all objective things and events, as connection of 
phenomena in an experience, must be in space and time ; and 
thus all objective connection of phenomena must have a 
space and a time. Space and time are thus common to both 
a construction of phenomena in the sense, and a connection 
of phenomena into things and events as experience in the 
understanding. Space and time are also a priori, that is, 
they are necessary and universal conditions for both con- 
struction of phenomena and connection of things, and may 
thus be used in an a priori investigation. And now, the 
design is to show, in the use of space and time, how it may 
be determined that constructed phenomena may be con- 
nected into things and events in an order of objective expe- 
rience, and how only this may be done, and which will be 
the Understanding in its Idea, 



SECTION III. 

SPACE AND TIME EXCLUDE ALL DETERMINED EXPERIENCE 
EXCEPT THROUGH THE CONNECTIONS OF A NOTIONAL. 

Experience is a determination of the apprehended phe- 
nomena to their particular places in one whole of space, and 
their particular periods in one whole of time. Except as 
the phenomena are apprehended there can be no experience, 
since nothing appears in the consciousness ; and when phe- 
nomena are apprehended, except they be determined to their 
places in the one space and their periods in the one time, 



228 THE UN DEE STANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

there can be no experience, for there is nothing connected, 
but a rhapsody of coming and going appearances with no 
order or significance And now the cognitions of space 
and time enable us to determine, a priori, that no connected 
experience in space and time can be except as the phenom- 
enal are connected through a notional in the understanding. 
1. The phenomena only may be given, and vie may at- 
tempt to construct their places in space and their periods in 
time by them. — We will show the necessary order of such a 
process, and that it can not result in any determined experi- 
ence. When a content is given in the sensibility and this is 
conjoined into definite figure and period, there will then be 
cognized a phenomenon occupying a place and period. This 
first content may pass from the sensibility and other content 
be given in it, and this in turn may be conjoined into defi- 
nite figure and period, and known as phenomenon having 
place and period. Such repeated constructions may go on 
indefinitely, and so long as the construction which termin- 
ates the former shall conjoin itself to the construction which 
begins the latter, there will be a continuation of place and 
period, and the particular place and period of the one may 
be determined relatively to the place and period of the 
other. Thus, I may construct a rod to the extent of a yard, 
and then, as that content passes, I may continue to construct 
a rope of five yards in length, and perhaps still right on may 
construct a chain ten yards long, and then I can very well 
determine that the rod, the rope, and the chain together are 
of such a length, and what the place of each is relatively to 
the others ; and so with the period. In the conjoining move- 
ment which constructed the rod there may have been one 
moment, and that of the rope five moments, and that of the 



NOTIONAL NECESSARY TO EXPERIENCE. 229 

chain ten moments, and then I can readily determine the 
period of the whole, and the relative periods and succes- 
sions of each with the others. Thus may.it be with any 
number of constructions contiguous in place and continuous 
in period. 

But I can not in this at all determine what their places 
and periods are in the one space and the one time, and thus 
attain to any ordered experience. They are contiguous and 
continuous, but in what direction in the one space and what 
succession in the one time, I can by no possible extent or 
number of constructions determine any thing at all. If my 
constructing agency had terminated with the rod, and a 
chasm had intervened with no content and no construction and 
thus nothing in the consciousness, when I again awoke in 
the self-conscious agency of constructing the rope, and then 
again a chasm and a conscious constructing of the chain, I 
could by no conjunctions of the sense pass over these chasms 
and determine direction and distance of places or succession 
and duration of period between the phenomena. When the 
conjoining agency ceases, then conscious extension and dur- 
ation ceases, and all places and periods must stand isolated 
in themselves and have no determined relationship to each 
other nor to the one space and the one time. Experience 
can not so be constituted. And not only in the one space 
and one time for the self whose agency constructs, but more 
especially in reference to a common experience among many 
selves, all constructions of phenomena must be helpless. 
The uninterrupted constructions may give determined places 
and periods to phenomena relatively to each other for the 
subject constructing, but only for him and for no other in 
common with him. Even while his constructions are m one 



230 THE UNDEESTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

place and one period in the continuity of the parts, this is 
only for him and for no one in communion with him. So 
his phenomena have been, and in his construction of them 
so his places and periods have been, but what phenomena, 
places, and periods other constructing agencies may have had 
in consciousness, he can by no conjunctions of the sense de- 
termine. His phenomena in places and periods relatively to 
each other have been for him, and others' phenomena in 
their places and periods relatively to each other have been 
distinctively for them, and neither can say any thing Avhat 
one has been relatively to the others, nor what all have been 
relatively to one whole of space and one whole of time. A 
universal order of experience can never thus arise. So all 
philosophy that builds up itself on that which is furnished 
by sense, and stands only in the consciousness, must neces- 
sarily proceed. It can give a relative experience so far as 
perpetuated perception goes, but it can attain to no deter- 
mination of phenomena in their places and periods in any 
one whole of space and of time for itself, and much less in 
any one space and one time in common for all. 

2. The one space and one time may be assumed, and the 
attempt made to connect the phenomena and determine their 
places and periods by them. — The process for such an at- 
tempted determination of experience has its one necessary 
order, and we may a priori see that this also must fail in 
all connection of phenomena. 

The cognition of space and time as a priori given in the 
sense, and which we have termed the pi^imitive intuition, is 
that of a diversity of points and instants wholly unconnected 
and unlimited. It is that which is possible to become con- 
joined and constructed in limits, but as without conjunction 



NOTIONAL NECESSARY TO EXPEEIEXCE. 201 

can be known only as pure diversity of points and instants. 
When conjoined by an intellectual operation the primitive 
intuition of space becomes pure figure, and that of time 
becomes pure period. In the sense, therefore, space and 
time can give no relationship to phenomena, for they become 
figure and period only by the construction which gives place 
and duration to the phenomena. The phenomena, we have 
just seen, can not determine their places and periods in one 
space and one time, for they are distinct and isolate among 
themselves ; and so the primitive intuition of space and time 
can not determine the places and periods of phenomena, for 
there is nothing but the pure diversity without and beyond 
the phenomena. 

But because in the understanding, through a process we 
are now forthwith in the next section to examine, the cogni- 
tions of space and time become that of concrete and con- 
nected wholes, it may be supposed that the separate and 
fleeting phenomena, in their distinct places and periods, 
may be so connected in the concrete one space and one 
time as to determine an experience thereby. It is thus 
space and time as given in the understanding, a concrete 
one space and one time, and not space and time as given in 
the sense, a pure diversity of points and instants, that we 
here cognize as the attempted medium for determining an 
experience. 

It is not difficult to think space and time in their total- 
ity, and to expound the process of the understanding in so 
doing. This we will first attend to and then show its utter 
incompetency for determining an experience in space and 
time. The cognition of Space as a total of all spaces is at- 
tained by a process of pure thought in the understanding ; 



232 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

not at all by a conjunction of places as in juxtaposition in 
the sense. A notional connective is assumed as everywhere 
pervading all places, and in this thought of an all-pervading 
connective, all possible places are brought into a coalition 
and made to belong to one concrete immensity of all space. 
Not a conjoining act, which takes spaces as in the diverse 
and constructs them into a total space, but an all-pervading 
connective is thought as already in space, holding it in one 
universal immensity in itself as conditional that any place 
may be taken as within space. There can, thus, be no 
chasm as a void of space around any definite place, as must 
ever be with all constructions in the sense ; but this all- 
pervading connective of spaces is a universal plenum to 
space, and therefore all places are held by it as in the one 
whole of space, and readily determinable in direction and 
distance each from any other in the one whole. There can 
be no separation of spaces, inasmuch as the all-pervading 
connective ever holds space in one whole, and while divi- 
sions may appear in space, separations can not be made of 
space. The understanding-conception of space is not thus 
an aggregate of spaces in juxtaposition, but one concrete 
wmole in its all-pervading connective, inseparable and im- 
movable both as a whole or in any interchange of its parts. 
Such notional connective into one immensity of all space 
gives to its conception in the understanding but one possi- 
ble mode, viz., that of absolute permanence. Every place 
in space has its own permanent position, in reference to the 
one immensity of space and to all other places. 

The understanding-cognition of Time, also, as a total of 
all periods, is attained in pure thought thus. A notional 
connective as ever-abiding is assumed to hold through all 



NOTIONAL NECESSARY TO EXPERIENCE. 233 

periods, and thereby making all possible periods adhere to- 
gether in the one eternity of duration. This, again, is no 
construction of a whole time out of diverse times conjoined 
in unity by bringing them in collocation, as in the sense ; 
but the perduring connective of all periods already first 
holds all times in one Time, in order that any period may 
afterwards be taken as in the one whole of all time. There 
can, thus, be no chasms in time as if there were intervals in 
which is no time, thereby isolating definite periods in their 
own times, as in the sense ; but this all-abiding connective 
makes one eternity of time, and all possible periods to be in 
it, and each inseparable from it, and determinable in succes- 
sion relatively to any other period. Time, thus, can not 
be sundered, but only things in time can be sundered in 
their different periods. Time in the understanding is not 
the conception of single, separate, and fleeting periods ; but 
an ever-abiding, all-embracing duration. 

The conception of time as one whole, is not like space 
restricted to one mode as permanence, but has three modes, 
which, as given in pure thought, it is here important should 
be clearly apprehended. When we take the conception of 
time in its ever-abiding connective, holding all periods 
within itself as the same perduring whole of all time, we 
have one mode of time which may be distinguished as the 
perpetuity of time. When, again, we have the conception 
of this all-abiding connective holding all possible periods 
within itself as a series, such that no one can be reached 
except in the coming and departing of all periods which pre- 
cede it, we have another mode of time which may be dis- 
tinguished as the succession of time. And, lastly, when we 
have the combined conceptions of the perpetuity and sue- 



234 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

cession of time, such that in the perpetual, no period of the 
successive can be coetaneous with any other period, but that 
each stands for itself only in the same point of all time, and 
can thus only be in the same time with itself and not in the 
time of any other period, we have a third mode of time 
which we may designate the simidtaneousness of time. 
These three, the perpetual, successive, and simultaneous, are 
all the possible modes of time, and are quite distinct each 
from each. The perpetuity of time, is the mode of perdur* 
ing in all periods ; the succession of time, is the mode of a 
progressus through all periods ; and the simultaneousness of 
time, is the mode of a standing in its own position for every 
period. While in a sense-conception we should say as fleet- 
ing as time, in the understanding-conception of the first 
mode we say as lasting as time ; while, again, in the sense, 
we have the alteration of time, in the understanding as 
second mode we have the continuance of time ; and, finally, 
while in the sense we have the indeterminateness of time 
in the understanding as the third mode we have the exact- 
ness of time. 

And now, with this attainment in the understanding of 
space and time in their universality, so that all places may be 
thought as in one time, and thus all places be determinable 
in direction and distance each from each in the one space, 
and all periods determinable in their succession and duration 
relatively to each other in the one time, it may be supposed 
that thus the phenomena given in sense can be determined 
to their places in space and their periods in time. And so 
they might be, if they were but ideal conceptions as in our 
thought of the modes of space and time. When I con- 
ceived of a rod, a chain, a rope, etc., as before, I should put 



NOTIONAL NECESSARY TO E X P E R I E N C E . 235 

these conceived phenomena in some place of my understand- 
ing-conception of all space as a whole, and thus in thought 
their direction and distance could be readily determined in 
the whole of all space. And so also in time, I should put 
the conception of their appearing in some period of my un- 
derstanding-conception of all time as a whole, and thus 
their ideal period could be readily determinable from all 
other periods in my thought of a whole of all time, as 
whether before or after, and how much in each case. But, 
this would leave the whole to be subjective merely. It is 
my thought of space and of time as a whole, and my con- 
ception of the phenomena to be put in space and time, and 
their places and periods to be determined; and their deter- 
mination is only ideal and subjective, for myself and with no 
possible significancy for any other self. In this way no ob- 
jective experience can possibly be given, determined in 
space and time. 

And, further, should it be assumed that each self has, as 
understanding-cognition, the same space and time each as a 
whole ; and that it is a law of thought that an understand- 
ing working any where should attain to just such modes of 
space and time; — which must be mere assumption that 
every man's space and time is precisely every other man's 
space and time — yet could not the real phenomena, which 
each man should perceive, be determined to their places and 
periods in an objective experience. The same sjDace and 
time would then be for each man, but his perceptions of 
phenomena would differ, and appear in different places and 
different periods, and each would have his own world for 
himself, with no community of common phenomena in the 
same place and in the same period as others. The appear- 



236 THE UNDER STANDING IN ITS IDE A. 

ing of the phenomena would determine all the connections 
in space and time, and this would differ as the perceptions 
came and went with every individual. The permanent 
mode of the one space, for all, could not determine the con- 
nections of the phenomena appearing in it, for all ; inasmuch 
as while the phenomena were perceived, the space could not 
be perceived, but could only be thought. And so with the 
three modes of time, which it may here be conceded all 
might have alike, they could not determine the connections 
of the phenomena appearing in time to be perduring, suc- 
cessive, or contemporaneous ; for while the phenomena were 
perceived, the modes of time could only be thought, and 
can not be made to have phenomenal appearance. I can de- 
termine the place of one phenomenon arising in a lake and 
then sinking, compared with another phenomenon after- 
wards arising and sinking, and can tell their bearing and 
distance ; but this is because the lake is itself perceived, 
and connects and determines the places of the appearance ; 
but such is not space and time as a whole ; they are thought 
not perceived. 

While, then, it might be admitted that the understand- 
ing in pure thought could attain to the modes of space and 
time as each a whole, yet could not this possibly avail to 
connect the phenomena appearing in space and time and de- 
termine their places and periods in an objective experience. 
If all might have, from some inner law of thought, the same 
modes of space and time, this could not give to them a com- 
mon experience in perception ; for their ideal subjective 
space and time, though admitted to be the same in all, yet 
can be perceived by none, and only thought, and can not 
thus be any media for connecting and determining in their 



NOTIONAL NECESSARY TO E X P E R I E N C E . 237 

places and periods, the phenomena which may be perceived 
by each. It is not necessary therefore to expose the as- 
sumption of a universal law of thought that would give to 
every understanding the same space and time from each 
one's own pure thinking, which resolves all into an arbitrary 
constitution of an understanding, and knows no reason for 
such a law rather than any other, and which involves the 
teacher of the doctrine in dogmatism and his disciples in 
credulity ; but we may pass it all by, since when admitted, 
it would be yet utterly in vain for all objective experience. 

3. There remains only this other supposition possible, 
that perhaps a notional connective for the phenomena may 
determine these phenomena in their places and periods in 
the tuhole of all space and of all time, and so may give both 
the phenomena and their space and time in an objective ex- 
perience. By using the conception of space and time as 
the media for ascertaining how an experience in space and 
time may be possible, we have now already excluded the 
two methods of Sensualism and Idealism, and found that 
neither the perception of phenomena, nor the thought of a 
whole of space and of time, can by any possibility give an 
experience determined in its connections in space and time. 
We are thus shut up to the one remaining process of con- 
ceiving a notional connective for the phenomena, which shall 
condition- them in their appearance and thereby in their 
places and periods, and thus determine their connections in 
space and time objectively. When we have found that 
neither the phenomenal nor the assumed one space and one 
time can connect our perceptions into an ordered experience, 
there is nothing left but a resort to the notional in the Un- 
derstanding. It is much to have here found the only possi- 



238 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

ble medium of any determined passage from the sense to the 
understanding, and to know that if made at all, it must be 
at this point and in this manner. Perceptions as phenome- 
nal can be brought into philosophical synthetic judgments, 
and thus into an order of experience, only through the no- 
tional. 

We will, in the next section, give the method of demon- 
strating a priori such a possible connection, and thus a pos- 
sible experience determined in space and time ; and in this 
will be exposed all the primitive Elements which enter into 
the operation of connection, and which give the functions 
of an understanding in its idea. 



SECTION IV. 

THE PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS OP THE OPERATION OF CONNEC- 
TION, GIVING A POSSIBLE EXPERIENCE DETERMINED IN 
SPACE AND TIME. 

But one possible method of connection now lies open. 
The phenomena must themselves be so connected in their 
grounds and sources of being, that every perception of them 
shall be conditioned by this notional ground to its place in 
space for each, and by this notional source to its period in 
time for each. It is now the design to show how, in this 
w^y, an experience determined in its connections in space 
and time is possible ; and in the process we shall attain the 
complete operation of Connection in all its primitive Ele- 
ments. 



PEIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF CONNECTION. 239 

Firsts we will attain to a possible determination of 
experience in Space. 

Let there be the conception of a force in a place, which 
maintains its equilibrium about a central point and com- 
pletely fills a definite space, and which forbids all intrusion 
within its place except in its own expulsion from it, and we 
will here call that conception of force the space-filling force. 
Its equilibrium every way upon its own center secures that 
it must remain steadfast in its own place, unless disturbed 
by some interfering force ab extra, and thus constancy and 
impenetrability are the necessary a priori modes of its being. 
This space-filling force is altogether a notion, and impossible 
that it should be other than an understanding-cognition, and 
yet it is manifest that it may be an occasion for phenomena 
as appearing in consciousness. To the sensibility in an 
organ of touch it opposes a resistance to muscular pressure, 
and may thus furnish the content in sensation for compara- 
tive hardness or softness, smoothness or roughness, and for 
figure and motion as yielding to pressure. It may also give 
content to the sensibility in any other possible organization 
when the requisite conditions are supplied ; as through the 
light, colors ; and through the air, sounds ; and through an 
effluvia of its own, smells ; and through a dissolving sapid- 
ity, tastes. It can not itself become appearance but thought 
only, and yet it may manifest itself through a sensibility in 
all possible quality, and while its mode of being in the un- 
derstanding is that of a force constant and impenetrable, its 
mode of being in the sense is that of its perceived quality in 
the manifold phenomena it occasions. The occasion for its 
own manifested mode of being in the sense is determined in 
its mode as given in the understanding, and this, when tho 



240 THE UNDEESTANDIJIG IN ITS IDEA. 

conditions are supplied, to any sensibility that may bring its 
content within any self-consciousness. It thus determines 
its own content in all sensibility, as conditioning the con- 
structing agency, and secures its phenomena to be objective 
in each, and itself as ground, the same object to all. The 
place in which the conjoining agency must construct the 
figure of its phenomena in the vision or the touch, is the 
same in the same self-consciousness at every repetition of 
the construction, inasmuch as the space-filling force is con- 
stant in its place and constant as occasion for phenomenal 
content in the sensibility ; and for the same reasons, the 
place must be the same to all possible self-consciousness 
within which the figure of the phenomena shall be con- 
structed. Whether, then, the content, be constantly in the 
sensibility or not — i. e., whether the eye be constantly in the 
direction of the object or not, or whether the touch be con- 
stantly upon it or not — the constant space-filling force deter- 
mines the constructed phenomena to be in the same place 
at every appearance, and for every percipient. 

Not, then, as in the sense only, in which every phenom- 
enon must come and depart in its own appearance and dis- 
appearance and its own definite figure in place come and 
depart with it, and thus the places be as isolate as the phe- 
nomena, with no possibility of determining them in one 
whole of all space ; but, with the coming and departing phe- 
nomena in the sense, we have here the space-filling force 
which occasions them conceived to be constant in the same 
place, and thereby determining the appearance to be in the 
same place, and this same place fixed in its one position in 
the one immensity of universal space. And, now, it matters 
not how many snch space-filling forces be conceived as each 



PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF CONNECTION. 241 

in its own place, and giving occasion each to its own phe- 
nomenal quality in the sense ; since all will be in a deter- 
minate relationship each to each in direction and distance in 
the one space which contains them all, and this also for all 
who shall perceive their phenomena. This determination of 
the relative bearing and distance of different objects in space 
from each other still, however, is conditioned on the same 
conception of the space-filling force being there present. If 
there be conceived any place in which there is no space-fill- 
ing force, then in that place there is nothing which may oc- 
casion phenomenal content, and as nothing can there be 
perceived, so it is manifest that nothing of place can be de- 
termined. Such a chasm of all space-filling being would 
necessitate an utter void of all experience, and it could never 
be determined how broad such chasm is ; in what direction 
from each other the phenomena on each side of it were;, nor 
where in the one universal space such chasm, as a void of 
all being, was situated. A chasm of all being in void space, 
of a cubic yard, would as effectually cut off all, experience on 
one side from all determinate relationship to any experience 
that might be on the other side, as would a void which 
might receive a thousand suns and their several rolling sys- 
tems. Whether there may be such voids of all being in 
space or not, or whether all of being may be circumsphered 
by such a void space, is not at all affirmed or denied,, here, 
but only this, that a determined experience in space can be 
possible so far forth only as a space is occupied by a space- 
filling force, giving occasion in its own constancy of being 
for constant phenomena to appear in the consciousness. 
The conception of a removal into a void space beyond all 
occasions for perceiving a phenomenal universe,, would pre- 

11 



242 THE UNDEESTAXDING IN ITS IDEA. 

elude all possibility for determining the place in the immen- 
sity of space which that universe occupies. Only as space 
is filled with that which, as understanding-cognition, is com- 
petent to furnish constant occasion for that which, as sense- 
cognition, may constantly appear, is it possible that any 
determination of space should be given in experience. Com- 
munication from one phenomenon to another, and thus from 
one determined place to another, can only be thought as 
possible where a plenum of being in space gives occasion 
for a continuous appearance from place to place. 

In this manner, and in this only, is it possible that expe- 
rience should be determined in space. A ground must be 
given in the space-filling notional for the construction of the 
continued phenomenal, and the space-filling ground will de- 
termine all its phenomena constructed in their definite places 
to be in the same place, and this, occasioning continued 
appearance, will determine its place in one universal space. 

But, it is now manifest that this space-filling force is the 
constant subsistence in which the phenomenal qualities in- 
here. The connection is that of subsistence and inherence. 
But this subsisting notional, which in the understanding is 
constant, is the same conception as that of Substance ; and 
the inhering phenomenal, which, though having occasion for 
a continual appearing, may yet come and go in the sense, and 
may therefore be quality as accidentally inhering, is the con- 
ception of Accidence ; and thus we have the a priori con- 
dition, that the determination of an experience in space rests 
upon the connection of subsistence and inherence, and which 
necessitates the being of Substance and Accidence. The 
first primitive Element in an operation of Connection is, 
therefore, that of Substance and Accidence. 



PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF CONNECTION. 243 

We will next examine how an experience determined in 
Time is possible. 

All consciousness of time depends upon the modifica- 
tions of the internal state. Except as changes occur in the 
inner sense, it must be impossible to apprehend that a time 
is passing. This capability of the inner sense to be modi- 
fied lies already as primitive Intuition in the self, and the 
capacity of the intellectual agency to move over the inner 
sense and thus modify the internal state, makes it possible 
that a subjective time should be brought within conscious- 
ness and constructed into definite periods. Thus, I may 
conjoin the primitive diversity in space in unity and thereby 
construct a definite figure in space, as a mathematical line. 
The movement of my intellectual agency in such construc- 
tion would change the inner state, in the passing of the in- 
tellectual agency through the diverse points in the primitive 
intuition of space, and thereby give in the consciousness the 
apprehension that a time was passing. This, it is manifest, 
must be wholly subjective, and the consciousness for myself 
only that a time was passing, inasmuch as it would be only 
my affection of inner state and by my intellectual action. 
Both the definite line as figure in space, and the definite 
period in time in which the constructing agency was passing, 
would be of no significancy except in my self-consciousness. 
Every point in the diversity of space through which the 
conjoining agency passed may be conceived as that which 
the moving agency successively occupied, and as thus stand- 
ing in it, each point may be called an instant of time ; and 
each interval from point to point may be conceived as that 
through which the intellectual agency in the construction of 
the line moved, and which may thus be called a moment of 



244 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

time ; the diversity in the primitive intuition of time may 
thus be considered as instants or moments, according to a 
conception of the points in the inner state to be affected or 
a conception of the moving agency from one point to an- 
other. As the agency stands in the point it is an instant, 
as it moves from the point it is a moment ; and as each mo- 
ment is a new modification of the internal state, there is a 
succession of affections going on in the inner sense, and thus 
the consciousness of a passing time. So long as my intellec- 
tual agency is thus passing from moment to moment a time 
is passing in my consciousness which I may construct into a 
definite period ; but when my intellectual agency ceases, all 
apprehension of passing moments must cease, and I can be 
no longer conscious that a time is passing. If again my in- 
tellectual agency pass from moment to moment, and I con- 
struct again a definite period, this last can have no deter- 
minate relation to the former, for a chasm of all conscious- 
ness of a passing time separates them, and it were impossi- 
ble that I should bring them into any conjunction in self- 
consciousness. Every period, as subjective time, is thus 
separate from all other periods, and all determination of any 
period in relation to one whole of time is impossible. The 
pure sense can only give its pure periods as separate, and 
thus the conception of time in it can not be of the one time 
but the manifold times. 

And so also with respect to phenomena in their periods. 
When any content in the sense is constructed in a definite 
figure in space, the intellectual agency gives the instants as 
it stands in the diverse points and the moments as it passes 
from point to point, as it does in a pure construction, and 
thus there is the consciousness that a time is passing ; and 



PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF CONNECTION. 245 

when this is constructed in a definite period, it is known as 
the time in which the phenomenon appears in consciousness. 
But this phenomenon thus constructed is objective in this, 
that the content in the sensibility has not been produced by 
the intellectual agency, and has only been constructed in its 
figure in space and its period in time by it. The quality, as 
real appearance, has from somewhere beside the agency of 
the self been given to it, and the agency of the self has 
constructed its form in space and time. Yet, while as real 
appearance the quality is objective, yet is the space and time 
in which it appears subjective only. It has been constructed 
in its definite period by my agency only and as it has affected 
my inner sense, and thus its period has no significancy ex- 
cept in my self-consciousness. When, therefore, I have con- 
structed one phenomenon in its period, and that phenomenon 
has passed, the constructing agency ceases and thus the in- 
ternal state ceases to have any successive modifications, and 
thereby all consciousness that a time is passing becomes im- 
possible. Where some new content in the sensibility is 
again constructed in its definite period, that phenomenon in 
its period is wholly separate from the former phenomenon 
in its period, and the chasm of all possible conjunction of 
time between them prevents all possibility of determining 
their relationship in one time. Phenomena in the sense can 
not be cognized as in one time, but their times are manifold. 
How, then, may phenomena, in their definite separate peri- 
ods, be conceived as possible to be determined in their rela- 
tionship in the universal objective time ? And here we an- 
swer, as before in reference to determination in Space, that 
it is possible only as the phenomena are themselves neces- 
sarily connected in their relations. How this may be in re- 



246 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

ference to the three modes of Time, the perpetual successive 
and simultaneous, must now be explained ; and such explan- 
ation completed will give to us the primitive Elements of the 
operation of connection, and thus complete the Idea of an 
Understanding. Each mode of time must be taken up sepa- 
rately, inasmuch as the manner of connection between the 
phenomenal and the notional must in each be different. 

1. The a priori determination of an experience in perpet- 
ual Time. — The conception of a space-filling force giving 
occasion for continual phenomena, and which is substance 
with the phenomenal qualities inhering, is sufficient for de- 
termining a possible experience in space ; but though a nec- 
essary preliminary this is not sufficient for determining a 
possible experience in time. The substance being constant 
in place, and giving occasion for continual phenomena in 
that place, is a sufficient condition for determining the bear- 
ing and distance in space of any other phenomenon, which 
may appear as inhering in its substance in its place, and 
which can be perceived in communion with the former phe- 
nomena. Such phenomena will be determined as in the 
same one objective space, and in their relative positions in 
that one space. A constant substance as of a star in the 
heavens, giving occasion for a continual phenomenal bright- 
ness in that constant place, is sufficient for determining that 
any other brightness in its place which may appear in com- 
munion with it, is in the same universal space, and the bear- 
ings and distance which it has with the first may also be 
readily determined. But if that substance, constant in its 
place and occasion for continual phenomenal brightness, 
never give occasion for any alteration in its phenomenal 
brightness, all the change that would be possible to be 



PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF CONNECTION. 247 

effected by it in the inner state would be the modification of 
appearance and disappearance, i. e., of perceiving and of 
not perceiving the brightness. When the organ was so di- 
rected as to receive the content and construct the phenome- 
non in space, a time would be apprehended as passing in 
self-consciousness, but when the content had gone from the 
sense and no constructing agency was modifying the inter- 
nal state, all apprehension of a passing time would be im- 
possible. The modification of inner state would be only 
that of consciousness of a time and that of no consciousness 
of a time, and this simply as the modifications occurred in 
the inner state of the subject-self perceiving and then not per- 
ceiving. That any such modification of internal state was 
occasioned by the substance and its phenomenal brightness 
could never be determined for any other self-conscious sub- 
ject, but only for the perceiving and non-perceiving subject- 
self, and hence the passing of any time in the self-conscious- 
ness must be subjective only. That there was any one uni- 
versal objective time, which must be the same in all subjects 
of self-consciousness, could not be thus determined. 

But, now, we will conceive that this space-filling force, 
constant in the same place, becomes somehow so modified 
inherently as to be occasion of continual phenomenon but 
yet phenomenon in alteration. The same substance gives 
occasion now for perceiving one quality as phenomenon in- 
hering in it, and again for perceiving another quality, and 
thus varying the mode in which the substance manifests it- 
self in the sense. The substance itself thus conditions its 
phenomena, and the conditioned variations of phenomena 
condition a modification of internal state, and thus of a pass- 
ing time in the self-conscious percipient ; and this not merely 



248 THE ITNDEESTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

from the arbitrary attention given by the perceiving self, 
but must be the same in all perceiving subjects of a self- 
consciousness. The substance itself conditions the varia- 
tions in the phenomena perceived, and thus of the altera- 
tions of the inner sense and thereby of the apprehension of 
a passing time, and this for all possible percipients of the va- 
ried phenomena ; and, therefore, for all possible subjects of 
self-conscious apprehension of this passing time, it must be 
the same time and objective to them all. Moreover, this 
same substance perdures through all modifications, and thus 
through all variations of its phenomena, and thereby deter- 
mines them all as they arise and depart still to inhere in the 
same substance ; and they, therefore, are all in continuous 
connection in their perpetual variations. The period of each 
varied phenomenon is connected in the one time through 
which the substance perdures, and thus all the periods of 
continuous varied phenomena are in the one perpetual time 
through which the one substance perdures, and this for all 
possible percipients of these varied phenomena in their varying 
periods. One perpetual time embraces all the periods which 
can come up in any experience of these varying phenomena, 
and thus this substance constant in place is not only space- 
filling, but perduring through all periods is also a time-filling 
substance. The determination of any phenomenon in this 
continuous variation, to its relative period with the periods 
of all other phenomena in the one perpetual time, is in this 
manner manifestly possible. Let all phenomena, as they 
come and depart in continuous alteration, be thought as the 
varied appearances of the same one perduring substance, 
and it is possible to determine their whole experience to its 
proper periods in the one perpetual time, and only in their 



PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF CONNECTION. 249 

connection of phenomena can an experience be so deter- 
mined. 

And now, the connection here is manifestly still that of 
subsistence and inherence, inasmuch as it is substance and 
accidence still, but this connection is given in a modified 
manner, not as constant substance and accidence, but as per- 
during substance and varying accidence. The qualities in- 
hering in the same substance alter, and thus the substance 
becomes in the thought perpetual source rather than con- 
stant ground of the phenomena; and the phenomena com- 
ing and departing are, in the thought, depending events 
rather than inhering qualities. The substance becomes the 
notion of source, and the accidence becomes the phenome- 
non of event, and the connection is that of origin and de- 
pendence, rather than as before of subsistence and inhe- 
rence. We shall thus have the a priori element of connec- 
tion in time to be a modification of the element found in 
connection in space, and which though still substance and 
accidence, we may distinguish in its modified conception as 
Source and Event. The first primitive Element of connec- 
tion is, in Space, Substance, and Accidence; and this as still 
the same though modified in the conception is, in perpetual 
Time, Source and Event. 

2. The a priori determination of an experience in succes- 
sive Time. — The perdurance of the time-filling force, as 
source for all the varying phenomena which as event depend 
upon it, would be sufficient for determining all their events 
in their several periods as occurring in the same perpetual 
time. The period of one could not be when the period of 
another was, but the events must come up singly into the 
experience, and thus be alternate in every self-consciousness. 

11* 



250 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

But with no other conception than that of source and event 
as element of connectioD, it would be impossible to deter- 
mine any fixed order of succession in the one time for all 
percipients of the events, or precisely where in one progres- 
sus of all time the period of any event in our experience 
was. That the phenomena of fluidity, of congelation, and 
of vapor, may all be the altered events from one source 
which I call water, is sufficient to determine that when one 
is the other can not be, and thus that all must somehow be- 
long to one perpetual time, but if I have nothing further 
than the conception of the connection of origin and depend- 
ence, I can not determine these alternations of events to any 
fixed order of succession in their period. That the phenom- 
ena alternate with each other at hap-hazard must leave the 
alternations of their periods in an equally indeterminate 
rhapsody of a coming and departing time, and when all phe- 
nomena are thus conceived as simply alternating each with 
each in their perpetual sources, it were impossible to deter- 
mine that any experience was proceeding either backward 
or forward in time, or whether it were not a perpetual oscil- 
lation to and fro in time. There is no fixed point in the 
thought, and thus no determining of period as before and 
after in a whole of time. All experience, as it originates 
in one perduring source must be in one perpetual time, but 
as nothing determines the flow in time and only the alterna- 
tion of periods, it were impossible to determine any order 
of succession to our experience in time. 

But, if we will now conceive that a modification of the 
source gives the condition for the alteration of the event, 
and that this modification has a fixed order of progressus, 
such fixed order of modification in the thought will necessi- 



PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF CONNECTION. 251 

tate the order in the varied phenomena, and give the capa- 
bility of determining the flow of experience in time and the 
relative position of any period in time in which the experi- 
ence occurs. Thus a substance, as water, may be an abid- 
ing source for the alternating phenomena of congelation, 
fluidity, steam, etc., but if we have the conception of source 
and event only, and thus the connection of origin and de- 
pendence alone, we can never determine from the mere 
alternations of events any order of progress, inasmuch as 
these alternations may be desultory, and go from fluidity to 
vapor or from fluidity to congelation with no necessary con- 
nection in the order of the series, though always originating 
in the same perpetual source. Such alternations of phenom- 
ena would condition corresponding variations in the internal 
state of the percipient subject, and the period of each might 
be definitely constructed and apprehended as in the same 
perpetual time from the connection of all in the same per- 
during source of being ; yet these periods could not be de- 
termined in one progressive flow, but must conform to the 
alternating phenomena. There is nothing in the inner sense 
to determine the order of succession, except as some fixed 
thought be given as notional connection in the understand- 
ing. Let, therefore, the substance, water, be so modified as 
space-filling by combination with another distinguishable 
force, as caloric, that the congelation can not appear except 
under such a given modification of the substance ; and thus 
also with the phenomena of fluidity, and of steam ; and at 
once a fixed order of succession in the phenomena is deter- 
minable, and thus also a fixed order in their periods in the 
inner sense, and the series must proceed in accordance with 
the progressus of the modifying force, caloric. The percep- 



252 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

tion of the phenomena must be conditioned by the inherent 
modifications of their source. The determination of a fixed 
order of modifications in the thought will determine a fixed 
order of connection in the phenomena, and thus a fixed or- 
der in their periods and thereby a progressive flowing on in 
time. Some standard, as a perpetual on-going of modifica- 
tion of substance in the thought and of corresponding phe- 
nomena in the perception, must be taken, and it will render 
determinable in time the period of all possible varying phe- 
nomena that may be held in communion with it. If the 
series can only be a progessus and never a regressus ; as, for 
example, in the modifications of the expressed juice of the 
grape, through the saccharine, vinous, and acetous fermenta" 
tions ; or the order of the seasons ; then an order of suc- 
cessive time may be determined, and all possible periods in 
which the phenomena may appear may be determined in 
their relative positions in this successive time, but impossi- 
ble in any other connection. 

This connection is that of efficiency and adherence, inas- 
much as the modification of the source makes the variation 
of the phenomenon, and this as event is not mere sequence 
but necessary result as dynamical adherent. The substance 
thus is not mere source for an event, but an efficiency is 
thought to be in it which necessitates the kind of event, 
and thus the source becomes the exact conception of a Cause 
and the necessitated event is the precise conception of an 
Effect ; and we have thus, as condition for determining phe- 
nomena in successive time, a second primitive Element of 
connection as Cause and Effect. 

3. The a priori determination of an experience in simul- 
taneous Time. — The connection of origin and dependence 



PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF CONNECTION. 253 

in the notion of source and phenomenon of event is suffi- 
cient for determining phenomena in perpetual time, and the 
connection of efficiency and adherence in the notion of cause 
and phenomenon of effect is sufficient for determining phe- 
nomena in a successive time ; but quite another element of 
connection must now be attained for determining phenom- 
ena in simultaneous time. The modified source as cause 
makes the event to be what it is as an effect, and as the 
modifications in the source proceed, such also is the necessi- 
tated succession of effects ; and as these phenomenal effects 
must modify the inner sense in the perception of them, so 
the periods of their appearing may be constructed and must 
be thought as in a fixed order of succession in time. But 
any number of such series of cause and effect may be con- 
ceived as passing on each in its own fixed order of progres- 
sus, and when the perception of these phenomenal effects is 
promiscuous from one series to another, it will be impossible 
from the connections which only run up and down the sepa- 
rate series to think any connection in communion each with 
each, and thereby to determine that any of the phenomena 
in each are contemporaneous, or, as the same thing, are in 
simultaneous time. Each can be determined to its position 
in its period according to the connections in its own series, 
for the thought has fixed the order of the progressus in that 
direction up and down the succession, but no one series has 
fixed any order of progressus in another series, and it can 
not thus be said whether one event in one is before or after 
any event in another series. The thought has no fixed con- 
nections athwart the series, and it is therefore impossible to 
determine the period of one in its time as having any rela- 
tion in time with the period in another. Thus, I may have 



254 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

different modifications of the substance, water, giving the 
varied phenomena as successive events of congelation, fluid- 
ity, and steam, and when I think them as connection of cause 
and effect in a necessary order, I may determine the periods 
of each effect in their appearance in successive time. And, 
again, when I have the varied modifications of the substance, 
caloric, in the successive temperatures of cold, agreeable 
warmth, and hot, and think them in connection as cause and 
effect in a necessary order, I may determine the periods of 
such effects in my experience in successive time. But if, 
now, I can think no connection between the ice and the 
cold, the fluid and the agreeable warmth, the steam and the 
heat, I can never determine the contemporaneousness of 
either, because I can only determine the period in each in 
their own successive time, but not at all determine the peri- 
ods in each to be simultaneous. 

Let, however, the conception of reciprocal modification 
be here entertained, so that the substance, water, modified 
by the caloric successively as cause for the effects of ice, 
liquidity, and steam, also modifies reciprocally the substance, 
caloric, as successively cause for the effects of cold, agreea- 
ble warmth, and heat ; and thus, that while water as modi- 
fied by caloric is the source of congelation, caloric so modi- 
fied by water is the source of cold, and thus on reciprocally 
through all successive effects in each : we shall thus, from 
this reciprocity of modification, determine a necessary con- 
nection of effects in each, and that the period of the one 
must synchronize with the period of the other, and that the 
phenomena of the ice and the cold, the fluid and the warm, 
the steam and the hot, must be together simultaneously each 
with each. The series of effects, and thus their periods in 



PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS OF CONNECTION. 255 

time, are connected as concurrent and concomitant, and the 
determination of the coetaneous in time is as readily made 
as before of the perpetual or successive in time. If every 
event in its series is not thus connected by a reciprocal effi- 
ciency with every other concurrent event in its series, it 
were wholly impossible to determine them to be contempo- 
raneous. All effects must be held in communion by a recip- 
rocal efficiency, as necessarily as in succession by a direct 
efficiency. 

And now, this last species of connection is that of re- 
ciprocity and coherence, inasmuch as the efficiency each way 
makes a mutual variation of the phenomena, and these as 
effects are not merely adherents as successive but coherents 
as in communion. The conception, therefore, of such recip- 
rocal causation is precisely that of Action and Reaction. 
This is the third primitive Element of connection. 

Through the media of Space and Time we have thus at- 
tained all the primitive elements of connection, and which 
must be that of substance and accidence having the connec- 
tion of subsistence and inherence for determining an experi- 
ence in Space ; and which, for determining an experience in 
Time, becomes modified into source and event, having the 
connection of origin and dependence for perpetual time; 
into cause and effect, having the connection of efficiency 
and adherence for successive time ; and into action and re- 
action, having the connection of reciprocity and coherence 
for simultaneous time. ISTo cognition of an experience de- 
termined in space and time can be, except as the phenome- 
nal in the sense is thought to be connected according to 
these primitive elements as the notional in the understand- 
ing. The operation of connection must, therefore, be uni- 



256 THE UNDEESTANDIKG IN ITS IDEA. 

versally conditioned upon the notions in an understanding 
of Substance as ground in space, and of Substance as source 
in time; which last, as modified for succession, becomes 
Cause ; and again modified for concomitance, becomes Re- 
ciprocal Causation. 



SECTION V. 

SOME OF THE A PRIORI PRINCIPLES IN A NATURE OP 
THINGS. 

As conditional for all determination of objects in Space 
and Time, the phenomena must inhere in their permanent 
substance, depend upon their perpetual source, adhere to 
their successive causes, and cohere by their reciprocal influ- 
ences. It is not possible that the phenomena of the sense 
can be determined in space and time except as they are thus 
connected among themselves, and thus condition the order 
of their experience in the understanding ; and wherever 
there is such a determined order of experience, there must 
be real phenomena standing in their valid substances causes 
and counter-influences, and constituting through such con- 
nections a systematic and organized whole of things which 
we properly term, as distinct from all ideal connections in 
our subjective thinking, an objective world. Separate and 
fleeting appearances are connected in their sources as events, 
and in their reciprocities as concomitant occurrences, and this 
every-way connection in our experience gives a nature of 
things, and considered as a whole of all such connected 
things we term it Universal Nature. 



A PRIORI PRINCIPLES IN NATURE. 257 

This is the province of the Understanding, to take the 
perceptions of the sense and determine their connection in 
a judgment of a nature of things ; and except in such field 
of operation it is impossible that an understanding should 
effect any judgments. If there may be existence which is 
not subjected to the space and time-determinations, and not 
bound in the connections of substances causes and reciprocal 
influences, it must be held as utterly without signification 
for an understanding which can operate only in the connec- 
tions of the phenomenal through the notional. The super- 
natural is as nothing for an understanding judging accord- 
ing to the sense. It would be as preposterous to put the 
understanding to the work of determining the supernatural, 
as to put the sense to determining substances and causes 
which are wholly supersensible. If we have no faculty 
which may transcend the cognitions given in an understand- 
ing then, truly, must we be ever shut up within nature, and 
that any existence may lie beyond nature must be wholly 
inconceivable. 

But this whole field of nature, as of the conception of 
phenomena connected into a universal whole of all possible 
experience in space and time, is the legitimate province of 
the understanding, and all that is possible to be known of 
it must be contained in such discursive judgments. Having 
now attained the process for all such judgments through all 
the different methods of connection which are a priori pos- 
sible in an experience determined in space and time, and 
thereby explained how it is possible to verify the synthetical 
judgment in its addition of a new cognition of the notion; 
we may further take the conception of such verified judg- 
ments, and by an analysis of their conditions we may find 



258 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

many predicates for an analytical judgment, which will give 
to us so many necessary and universal principles as condi- 
tions in a nature of things. This we will now proceed to 
accomplish through each of the connective notions made use 
of in their methods of discursive connection, viz.: the Sub- 
stance, both as ground and source ; the Cause, as condition- 
ing changes ; and the Reciprocal Agency, as conditioning 
concomitances. 

1. Substance. — This, we have found, is a notion wholly 
supplied in the understanding ; impossible to be reached by 
the sense ; standing under all phenomena as their ground or 
source ; and yet which may be verified as objective being 
and not mere subjective notion, from the determination in 
space and time which it gives to experience. As pure con- 
ception in the understanding it is ground for all quality and 
source for all event ; and as verified in a determined experi- 
ence, objectively, it is a space-filling force in its ground for 
all perceived quality, and a time-filling force in its source for 
all changing events. As no construction can place it in the 
light of consciousness, so no immediate intuition can take 
cognizance of it ; but through the media of space and of 
time, it has been a priori found to be a necessary condition 
for all determination of an experience in the relations of 
space and the relations of perpetual time ; and, therefore, 
wherever an experience determines itself in its relations in a 
whole of space, there must be a space-filling substance as 
permanent ground for the phenomena which appear un- 
changed in the same place; and wherever an experience 
determines itself in its relation to one perpetual time, there 
must be a time-filling substance as perduring source for the 
changing phenomena there occurring. 



A PRIORI PRINCIPLES IN NATURE. 259 

And here, if we will take the conception of this verified 
objective space-filling and time-enduring substance, and 
analyze it as connective notion for qualities in one space and 
events in one time, and thus standing as the substantial es- 
sence and thing in itself of material nature, and of which all 
perceived jmenoniena of quality and event are but the modes 
of its manifestation through the different organs of the 
sense, we shall in such analysis be able to find many a priori 
principles of nature, as the analytical elements and condi- 
tions without which a nature of things as given to an 
experience determined in space and time can not be. 

Let us, then, take the conception in the first place, of sub- 
stance as space-filling, and find the analytical content which 
must belong to it. Our analysis must be of that which is 
wholly supersensual, and not at all phenomenal but notional 
as the transcendental ground and condition for all phenom- 
ena ; and thus, an indispensable prerequisite to such analy- 
sis is a distinct conception of this understanding notion of a 
space-filling force. All conception of force involves action, 
but a mere pure act does not give the conception of force. 
Action in one direction, meeting no other action, could have 
nothing answering to the conception of force. Except as 
action meets action and thereby counter-action takes place, no 
generation of force is conceivable, and hence all conception of 
force is truly that of a product from an antagonism. It is not 
original pure act, but the resultant of pure counter-action. 
At the point of counter-agency, as pure notion in the under- 
standing, shall we first attain the conception of force ? . ei e 
understanding-conception. Such a point becomes an occu- 
pied position in space and resisting all displacement, and to 
the extent to which the diverse points in a space are contig- 



260 THE tjNDEIt STANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

uously thus occupied by pure forces is there a filling of space, 
and a resistance to all foreign intrusion within such space. 
And here, with this conception of pure force as occupying a 
space, we have all that is now necessary to be considered as 
sufficient for the pure understanding-conception of a space- 
filling substance. This pure space-filling force, as thing in 
itself, can not appear in the sense, but may very well be 
occasion that there should be phenomena in the sense. It 
may readily give content in the sensibility, and thus occasion 
different affections which may be both distinguished and 
conjoined, and thus become distinct and definite phenomena. 
To the sensibility of the touch and muscular effort, it may 
give content for the phenomena of resistance, figure, super- 
ficial smoothness or roughness, hardness or softness, and 
weight or pressure, etc. And so, also, through the inter- 
vention of other media it may give content to vision ; to 
hearing, smelling, or tasting ; and this in all possible ways 
of such organs of sensibility becoming affected, according 
to the modifications internally of the space-filling force. The 
phenomena are thus the modes in which the one space- 
filling force manifests itself through the perceptions of the 
sense. This permanently fills its space, and stands in its 
position, and is constant occasion for the like content in all 
organs of all sensibilities. It thus must determine its own 
place, and its relation to all other space-filling substances in 
their places, and become objective experience as the same 
thing in its place for all occasions when its phenomena are 
perched, and for all subjects of the self-conscious percep- 
tions. 

If we had only the vague conception of substance and 
of cause as somehow standing under the qualities and be- 



A PRIORI PRINCIPLES IN NATURE. 261 

tween the events, we could not make any intelligible analysis 
of them, nor attain any a priori principles of nature from 
them. But the clear conception we may gain of force as of 
two counteracting activities, and the modifications that 
must occur when forces interfere with each other, lays open 
before us the whole intrinsic nature of substances and causes. 
They can not be constructed and thus be immediately beheld 
as mathematical figure, and therefore no analysis of them 
can be intuitive ; but they can be clearly thought, and such 
thought may have its complete analysis, and such analysis 
will give necessary principles in nature. 

And now, with this pure understanding-conception of 
the space-filling substance, it is quite manifest from a mere 
analysis thereof, that a permanent impenetrability must 
belong to it in the space which it occupies, and that this 
will be a valid index in the sense, that a space-filling sub- 
stance occupies the place into which the phenomena of 
another substance can not be introduced without a displace- 
ment of the phenomena already there appearing. The prin- 
ciple of impenetrability must thus belong to a nature of 
things, and the conception of such impenetrability must be 
essential to the conviction that any phenomenon has sub- 
stantial objective reality. The empirical determination of 
substance to its place may be thereby effected when an im- 
penetrability is perceived in that place, and the sameness of 
a substance may be determined for the sense when the same 
phenomena are occasioned from the same impenetrability. 

And so also inertia must be a first principle in matter. 
The antagonisms which constitute the force in each point of 
space filled balance each other, and are thus at rest from this 
mutual resistance, and so the matter must remain at rest 



262 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

except as impelled by the impact of some other material force. 
When thus impelled the antagonisms have a greater energy 
on one side, and must therefore move before this greater 
energy and in the direction from it, and so the matter must 
continue to move till some outer material force be met to 
restore the equilibrium of the antagonist energies. Inertia 
is not inaction intrinsically, but intrinsic antagonist action 
self-balanced. The matter holds itself in its given state as a 
vis inertiaz. 

And again, that infinite divisibility is an a priori pre- 
dicate of all material substance is clear in an analytical judg- 
ment. The space-filling force is a point in the antagonism 
of a pure counteraction and has thus, as the mathematical 
point it occupies, position only and not magnitude. And 
the entire space filled by the substance is so filled only, as 
every point in the space is position for the point of an an- 
tagonism engendering force, and thus the substance is as 
divisible as the space which it fills. It is also manifest that 
the intensity of the counteraction is the measure of the force 
engendered in every point of the space filled, and therefore 
that the same space may yet be filled, while the quantity of 
the substance filling may differ in an infinite degree. Every 
point in the space may have its occupying force, and the in- 
tensity of the force may be from the point =0, onwards to 
an infinite amount. Substance is thus divisible without 
limit in two ways ; in the extent of space filled, and in the 
intensity with which the same space is filled. The atom of 
matter is thus no possible phenomenon in the sense-concep- 
tion, but a notion in the understanding-conception. It is the 
force engendered in one point of pure counteraction, and 
while it may occupy space merely as simple position with- 



A PRIORI PRINCIPLES IN NATURE. 263 

out extension, it yet may be of an infinite diversity in its 
intensity, and thus some one atom might have an intensity 
which should equal the aggregate atoms of a world. Not- 
only infinite divisibility as diminution of space filled, but 
also infinite divisibility as diminution of intensity in the 
same place, may be a priori predicated of all material being ; 
inasmuch as an evanishing in the same place may as truly 
pass through infinite degrees, as a dividing of the place may 
pass through infinite limits. In this respect, space and sub- 
stance differ in the thought : space is divisible only as extent ; 
substance is divisible both as extensive and as intensive. 

We may also, in the second place, analyze the conception 
of substance as time-filling, and determine some of its a 
priori principles in this direction. This same space-filling 
force indicating itself in its constant impenetrability, may 
be conceived as giving its content to the sensibility, and in 
this manner its phenomena to the perception, and these as 
changing in their definite places, or as themselves changing 
in the same place; and in either case a filling of time will be 
determined. The moving of the phenomena from place to 
place in the perception must affect the inner state, and thus 
induce the consciousness that a time is passing ; and this 
may be conjoined into its definite periods, while the con- 
stancy of an impenetrability in the changing places of the 
phenomena will give a perduring substance through all these 
changes, and thus determine these definite periods to be in 
one perpetual time. Or, the changing of the phenomena in 
the same place must also affect the inner state by the per- 
ception, and thereby induce the consciousness that a time is 
passing ; and this may be conjoined in definite periods, and 
the constancy of the impenetrability will give the same sub- 



264 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

stance as permanent source for the changed phenomena, and 
thus determine the definite periods to stand in the one per- 
petual time. In either case, therefore, the permanent sub- 
stance perdures through a time, and is thus time-filling. 

And now, inasmuch as the perpetuity of the one time is 
determined only by the perdurance of the one substance as 
source through all its changes, and that as the one time en- 
dures so the one source of all changes of phenomena must 
endure; it follows, that the understanding can admit of 
nothing which is new to come into its conception. That 
which arises and departs is the phenomenal, and is new only 
as a sense-conception ; but it has come up from some per- 
during source, and when it has departed there has not been 
a void left in the understanding, for the substance still is, as 
the constant source for new phenomena ; and thus, for the 
understanding neither a coming nor departing can be, but a 
perpetuity of things endures. Origin from nothing, and 
extinction in nothing, are both inconceivable. It would be 
a void of all being before and after the phenomenon ; or, a 
chasm of vacuity between phenomena ; which would cut off 
all possible connection in the determinations of the under- 
standing, and in the admission of which the understanding 
would annihilate its own functions. Neither nature nor 
time could be thought in their unity, nor that nature 
had any determinate position in time. This is, there- 
fore, an d priori principle of nature — that no change of 
phenomena can arise from non-being, and vanish again into 
non-being, but must ever originate in some permanent 
source, and depart with that source still perduring. The 
old dictum of the ancient philosophers is peremptory, viz. : 



A PRIORI PRINCIPLES IN NATURE. 265 

" E nilo, posse nil gigni ; 
In nilum, nil posse reverti." 

Whether substance itself may begin, and thus the crea- 
tion of a thing in itself be effected by that which is free 
personality and not a thing, is a question for quite another 
faculty than the understanding. So far as an action of the 
understanding can reach, it must be by bringing phenomena 
in discursive connections through the medium of the no- 
tional, and it were as absurd to attempt thinking phenomena 
into a nature of things without a permanent substance, as to 
attempt perceiving the shapes of phenomena without place. 
The conception of the substance as notion in the under- 
standing is conditional for all function of an understanding ; 
and of course the inquiry, whence is the permanent sub- 
stance ? must transcend all action of the understanding as 
the faculty judging according to sense. The substance, as 
space-filling force, verified in the determination of an expe- 
rience to the space-relations, and the substance also as time- 
filling force, verified in the determination of an experience 
to the time-relation of perpetuity, being given, the under- 
standing may use it for connecting a universe of nature in 
the immensity of one space and the eternity of one time ; 
but, when it would transcend connections through this sub- 
stance, and inquire for an origin of the substance itself, it is 
abolishing the very notion which determines the immensity 
and the eternity in their oneness, and obliging itself to think 
another substance in another immensity and eternity, of 
which this system of nature in its space and time is but a 
modification. It is an understanding attempting to over- 
leap itself by issuing its agency outward into some higher 
understanding, and could even thus only employ itself in an 

12 



266 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

endless leaping from sphere to sphere, without the possibil- 
ity of resting in a final landing-place. 

The perduring source of these changing phenomena is 
conceived to be before the first phenomenon, and to con- 
tinue still in the departure of the last, and thus to hold all 
the phenomena within one perpetuated duration, and neither 
beginning nor ending nor at all exhausting itself in any of 
these perpetuated successions. The substance persists 
through all modes of its manifestation without beginning or 
end, augmentation or diminution. The force in one point 
may be modified by any combination of forces in other 
points, but the space-filling force once given, its modifica- 
tions in any part can only occasion new phenomena in the 
sense, not any creations of new nor annihilations of old sub- 
stances. It is thus an a priori principle of Nature, that 
within itself nothing is created nor annihilated y but itself 
remains the same whole through all its transformations. If 
any thing may be added to it, or taken from it, it must be 
by some ab extra interference ; and is, of course, the intro- 
duction of some supernatural agency which can have no 
conceivable significancy in any Judgment of the Under- 
standing. 

And this conception of the permanency of the substance 
of nature, and the coming and departing of the phenomena 
of nature, discriminates between some other conceptions 
which are often confounded. The conception of change is 
that of any modification in the permanent substance ; the 
conception of alteration is that of the departing of one phe- 
nomenon and the arising of another ; and the conception of 
variation is that in which one phenomenon is made distinct 
from another. Thus the permanent substance changes and 



A PEIOEI PRINCIPLES IN NATURE. 267 

thereby alters its phenomena, and these phenomena vary 
one from the other. There can be no change but in a per- 
manent which neither alters nor varies. We may change 
the mode of the same thing, alter one thing for another, and 
vary different things among themselves. 

We have also in this the conception of chance. It is the 
origination of phenomena from no permanent source. It is 
no positive judgment, but a negation of the connective 
conditional for all judgments, and assumes an origination 
from a void of all being. It is the absurdity of think- 
ing through the sense ; of discarding the notion and 
thus vacating the understanding, and yet attempting to 
account for the connections of phenomena. It is a negation 
of the law of thought itself, and thus such an experience of 
nature is an absurd and impossible conception. A Nature 
of things can not admit of Chance. 

2. Cause. — This we have already found to be a primi- 
tive Element of connection and thus a primitive understand- 
ing-cognition, wholly supersensible, and yet possible to be 
verified as objective being in the determination of an expe- 
rience to successive time. We shall find a clear conception 
of cause to admit of an a priori analysis, which will give 
the predicates of a nature of things in an analytical judg- 
ment in several important particulars; and which, as in- 
volved in the connections of nature itself, must be the nec- 
essary and universal principles and conditions of a nature 
of things. The first requisite is, the attaining of a clear 
and complete conception of Cause. No construction is pos- 
sible that it may be given in a definite intuition, but its con- 
ception must be wholly within the thought of the under- 
standing. 



268 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

When we recur to our conception of substance, we have 
a force in every point of space which the substance occupies, 
and is thus space-filling ; and a perduring through every 
instant of time that, as source for coming and departing 
phenomena, the substance continues and is thus time-filling. 
This substance, as time-filling, is the conception of a modi- 
fication of the internal space-filling force so that as thus 
modified it becomes occasion for an altered content in the 
sensibility, and consequently of an altered phenomenon in 
perception ; and we say that the same thing has become 
changed. But, manifestly, this space-filling force as sub- 
stance will hold itself at rest in each point of its antagonism 
from the constancy of the balanced counteraction, and thus 
nature will hold itself in utter immobility and which is its 
inertia throughout, if the force in one portion of space does 
not intrude upon the places occupied by other forces ; or, 
which is the same thing, if one substance does not become 
combined with, or make an impulsion upon another sub- 
stance. When such cases occur, the combination of forces 
must work an inner modification of the antagonism in each 
point of counteraction, and thus necessitate altered contents 
for the sensibility and consequently altered phenomena in 
the perception, and we shall have chemical changes ; and 
the impulsion of the forces must modify the intensities of 
the points of counteraction, and we shall have mechanical 
changes. In all such modifications of forces as space-filling, 
while the perduring impenetrability will indicate the sub- 
stance which is the permanent source of these altered phe- 
nomena, yet will that substance which obtrudes its modifica- 
tions upon this permanent source be a distinct conception ; 
and it is this obtruding of one space-filling force upon an- 



A PKIOEI PRINCIPLES IN NATUEE. 269 

other in its modifications which, precisely, is the conception 
of cause. All physical cause implies a duality of agency. 
Thus the permanent substance which we conceive to have 
been constant in all the alternations of congelation, fluidity, 
vapor, etc., we conceive as the source of these alternating 
phenomena ; "but the substance which has obtruded itself in 
its modifying force, and thus produced the changes in the 
permanent source, we conceive as the cause of these alter- 
nating phenomena. The substance, caloric, is combined 
with the substance, water, and thus as one space-filling force 
so modifying the other space-filling force, that in its various 
modifications the caloric is cause and the water is source 
now for congelation, again for fluidity, and again for vapor, 
etc., as chemical changes ; and the ivory of the billiard-hall 
at rest as space-filling substance has been so modified in its 
intensities of counter-agency at each point in the space it 
filled, by the obtrusion of the ivory of the moving ball upon 
its place, that the first has become source of continual dis- 
placement in the resulting movement, and the last has been 
the cause of such movement, as mechanical change. Thus 
in all cases of causation, the conception of a cause is that of 
a space-filling force as one substance obtruding itself upon 
the place of another space-filling force as substance, and by 
the modifications induced securing chemical, mechanical, or 
other changes in the latter, Avhich manifest themselves to 
the sense in the altered phenomena. 

It is, therefore, clearly involved in the very conception 
of a cause, that as the changes induced in the permanent 
source by the modifications of the cause pass along accord- 
ing to the conditions of the combination of the substance- 
cause with the substance-source, so the altered phenomena 



270 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

springing from these changes in their substance-source must 
pass on in the same conditioned succession. The modifica- 
tion of the source by the cause is the condition for the 
altered phenomena, and this alteration of phenomena must 
correspond to the changes in the source. The perception 
can, therefore, be but in one order, and this conditioning of 
an ordered series of perceptions is an index of an ordering 
series of causation. When the phenomena in their succes- 
sions in the sense can be perceived in one order only, and 
not the reverse, then it is that an ordered series of changes 
is going on in the substance-source as conditioned by the 
combination with it of the substance-cause ; and in this may 
we determine an objective succession as distinct from mere 
successive appearance in the subject perceiving. There is 
in this an alteration of phenomena, and not a mere succes- 
sion of perceiving acts. 

Thus, when in a hemisphere of the heavens, I perceive 
one star in succession after another, and as one passes from 
my sight another comes into vision, the perceiving agency 
is as truly successive and may be constructed into its defin- 
ite periods as completely as if one star had been the condi- 
tion of my seeing the next, and thus on through the whole 
series. Merely such a succession in perceiving will deter- 
mine nothing in relation to an objective succession in the 
phenomena themselves ; but if I find I may reverse my or- 
der of perception, and see the same stars successively in a 
retracing of my series of perceptions, I then know that not 
the stars themselves are successive, but only my perception 
of them. But if I follow my perception of the tides as 
ebbing and flowing, and thus at any one point as rising and 
falling successively, and I can not perceive in an inverse 



A PEIOEI PRINCIPLES IN NATURE. 271 

order that the water is either rising or falling at pleasure,; I 
then determine that it is not a mere successive perceiving, 
but an objective succession in the phenomena themselves. 
And in this objective succession of phenomena, I shall have 
an index of a conditioning series of causes. And here, that 
I may determine the cause and the source of these succes- 
sive phenomena, I must be able to determine the objective 
reality of their substances, and in these, which is the cause 
and which is the source. I may very readily determine a 
perpetual impenetrability in the rising and falling water, and 
know that to be permanent source for the flow and ebb of 
the tide which appears ; but it may be much more difficult 
to determine that the force of the revolving moon modifies 
in combination with it the space-filling force of the substance 
water, and thus maizes the latter to be source for the ebbing 
and flowing tide ; and yet except as I have so determined, 
though I may have determined that there is causation, yet 
have I not found what is the cause. I may very readily 
determine that the phenomena of saccharine, vinous, and ace- 
tous fermentation are objective alterations and not merely 
successive perceptions, for I can not vary the order of the 
perceptions ; and I may also determine the source of these 
altered phenomena of the sugar, the wine, and the vinegar, 
by determining a permanent impenetrability constant in one 
substance through them all ; and though I have thus clearly 
determined that this substance-source must stand in combi- 
nation with some substance-cause and be modified thereby, 
yet it may be impossible for me to determine what that 
permanent space-filling force in its perpetual impenetrability 
is, which is the substance-cause for these cha*hges ; but until 
such is found, though some cause must be, yet what the 
cause is has not yet been determined. 



272 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

That a cause is, lias a safe index in this — an ordered suc- 
cession of phenomena perceived in a determined series; what 
a cause is, must be determined in this — a perpetual impene- 
trability that marks the substance, which by combining with 
the substance-source of the phenomena modifies its changes, 
and thus conditions its successions of phenomena. One 
space-filling force can not impinge upon or combine with 
another, without so modifying it as to induce some changes 
in it, which must manifest themselves in the sense by some 
alteration of the phenomena, and this competency to so 
induce changes is the essential of causality, and Avhich we 
term the ipower, or the efficiency of the cause, and which is 
the causal nexus, as notion in the understanding, for con- 
necting the successions in the phenomena. If, then, we 
sometimes find the phenomena in the substance-cause and 
those of the substance-source to be together : we shall still 
determine that to be cause in which the efficiency is, and cog- 
nize it as necessarily first in the understanding-conception, 
though both may appear together in the sense. Thus I may 
first perceive a vapor, and then perceive a heat as phenom- 
enon of the notional caloric which causes the vapor ; and 
though I may perceive that the heat and the vapor are toge- 
ther in the sense, yet inasmuch as I determine the efficiency to 
be in the caloric of which the sensation of heat is phenomenon, 
I judge the heat to be truly first in order and the vapor to 
succeed it. And so, moreover, when I simply perceive vary- 
ing phenomena in some source, but can not perceive any 
phenomena of the substance-cause, the determination that 
there is an efficiency inducing these changes in the source is 
quite sufficient that I should judge some substance-cause to 
be present, although it does not manifest itself by any of its 



A PEIORI PRINCIPLES IN NATURE. 273 

own phenomena in the sense, but only to the understanding 
through the changes which it is effecting in the source of 
these coming and departing phenomena. Thus, I may per- 
ceive the altered phenomena which magnetism v is effecting 
in some substance-source, as the movement and disposition 
of the steel-filings after an ordered arrangement ; and though 
no phenomena mark the presence of the magnetic substance 
in the place where the steel-filings have been arranging 
themselves, yet my understanding at once concludes that 
some permanent space-filling force is present, and that the 
sharpening and perfecting of some organic sensibility might 
be sufficient to receive its content as a sensation, and capaci- 
tate the intellect to discriminate and construct it into a com- 
plete phenomenon. In my understanding, I therefore con- 
clude magnetism, and so also electricity, galvanism, and 
even gravitation, to be space-filling forces, although they 
manifest themselves to the sense in no other way, than by 
the altered phenomena which they produce in other sub- 
stances. 

The efficiency in any substance-cause may be conceived 
to He in the substance as an inherent property, even when it 
is not in combination with any other space-filling force as 
actually inducing changes therein, and it is such conception 
that we mark by the term latent powei\ implying that it 
would induce changes were the occasion given for its com- 
bination with some other substance. We thus conceive the 
steel and flint as possessing the latent power to produce the 
spark, though no occasion of collision has occurred ; yet 
ought we not to hold such notion of latent power to be that 
of cause, but only that on occasion of their combination in 
collision, there would be cause, viz., a modification of the 

12* 



274 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

space-filling force. The steel and flint are no more cause for 
the spark than a chip and leather, except as brought in com- 
bination ; for without this the phenomenon of the spark can 
no more appear in the sense from one than from the other. 

An analysis of this conception of Cause will also expose 
some important distinctions in reference to occurring events 
which are often very confusedly apprehended. Thus, when 
I conceive of a series of causes and effects passing on in 
their order, and some phenomenon extraneous to this series 
and not at all accounted for in it comes suddenly in, and in- 
terrupts the process of thinking in its connections as going 
on in the experience, I term this intruding phenomenon a 
casual event, and perhaps, as if surprised by it, I say, it 
somehow so happened / or, that it was an accident. The 
meaning is, not that any such occurrence has come without 
both its source and its cause as space-filling substance, but 
that its connection is quite in another series of cause and 
effect from that which we were then determining in an 
experience, and in proportion to the suddenness, supposed 
disconnection, and difficult explanation of the intruding 
phenomenon is our surprise, and the mystery in which we 
leave the casual occurrence. 

When we follow the conception of connected phenom- 
ena in one source through their successions, as of the juice 
of the grape through its successive stages of fermentation, 
we have the judgment of a change in things. When we 
follow the conception through the successions of a series of 
causes, we have the judgment of a train of events. Thus, 
in the return of the sun from the winter solstice, and the 
dissolving of the snow and ice, and the overflow of the 
streams, and the deposition of organic remains upon the 



A PRIORI PRINCIPLES IN NATURE. 275 

fields, and their increased fruitfulness, and the augmented 
business, wealth, population, etc., we have a successive com- 
ing out from different sources of new phenomena which we 
term events ; and these are all conditioned in their order of 
occurrence by their series of causes, and we therefore say, 
that they occur in a train. These successions have no con- 
nection in one source, but the phenomena vary the substance 
in which they originate with every step, and their connec- 
tion is only through a varied combination of substances, of 
which one becomes an occasion for the next, and thus on- 
ward through all the efficiency of the changes by their 
causes. And again, when we conceive the antecedent not 
as the efficient, but only as a preparative occasional for an 
efficient, we may deem both the occasional and the efficient 
to be causes, but their distinction in the conception must 
be noted by some qualifying phraseology. Thus in the 
overflow of the streams as following the dissolving of the 
snow, the dissolving is only a preparative occasional for and 
not an efficient for the overflowing. The disengaging of the 
fluid by the dissolution of the congelation prepares the way 
for the efficiency of gravitation to come in combination and 
produce the overflowing; and then this overflowing is 
again a preparative occasional for the deposit of its sedi- 
ment, inasmuch as the quiet state of the waters which en- 
sues permits again gravitation as an efficient, to bring the 
suspended particles to the bottom. We may mark this dis- 
tinction by calling the one an accasional cause^ and the 
other an efficient cause ; and in many cases such distinction 
leads to very important philosophical consequences. The 
old scholastic distinctions are not unworthy of careful pres- 



276 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

ervation ; as causa causans, causa causata, causa efficient, 
causa sine qua non, etc. 

This clear conception of Cause gives opportunity for a 
further analysis, by which still more important a priori 
principles in a nature of things are determined. The con- 
ception of fate is that of a cause in utter blindness ; compe- 
tent to originate effects, and yet utterly without determina- 
tion of what the effect must be. It is a blind giant in its 
power, irresistible and inexorable, under which, the doc- 
trines of the Stoic become the highest wisdom, viz., that 
there is nothing to pray for and nothing to pray to ; nothing 
to be feared or hoped ; and the part of virtue is to receive 
all things in perfect equanimity, inasmuch as while some- 
thing must come, there can be no possible conditioning of 
what is to come. The cause is positive, but all conditioning 
of the effect in the cause is negative. The understanding 
has simply the connective of efficiency, and therefore it may 
determine that one thing shall make changes in other things, 
and successions of phenomena shall flow on ; but it has no 
connectives for judging what changes shall be induced, and 
thus no determination of what phenomena must appear. 
But if we will here analyze our conception of cause, we 
shall find a nature of things no more admitting of Fate than, 
as above seen, of Chance. The space-filling force as sub- 
stance in a nature of things already is, and the conception 
of cause is the efficiency of one substance in combination 
with others to induce changes therein, and thus condition 
the phenomena which must appear in the sense. But the 
given combination, from the inherent forces of the space- 
filling substances as cause and source, can produce only a 
given modification, and thus a given change, and thus also a 



A PRIORI PRINCIPLES IN NATURE. 277 

given phenomenon ; and every change must also be condi- 
tional for its next combination of substances, and thus on- 
ward in endless development, but with the inherent princi- 
ple in every succession as an intestine law of what every 
subsequent succession must be. In nature there can no 
more be a blind fatality of result, than there can be a rest- 
ing of causation. Both the cause must go out into effect, 
and must go out in such effect, and the whole is given in 
the germ as truly as any part in the past development. 
Causation has its connections in intelligible inherent law, 
and knows nothing of a blind Fate, which would annihilate 
all function of an Understanding in Experience. 

Again, the conception of liberty is that which may pro- 
pose to itself as cause an alternative of ends, and go out in 
its agency for the one in the possession of an efficiency for 
its alternative. It is positive of agency and positive of con- 
ditions, but as having an alternative of conditions it is neg- 
ative of a necessitated order of effect. But in the causation 
of nature an alternative of conditions is an impossibility. 
No combination of space-filling forces can induce but one 
modification in any point of efficiency, and the cause must 
as necessarily go out into its own conditioned effect, as it 
must go out in effect at all. In Nature there can be no: 
Liberty. 

And, lastly, the conception of a leap in nature would be 
that of passing from effect to effect without an intermediate 
efficiency, and thus in one stage of development reaching an 
advanced position without passing through the intermediate 
changes. Such a conception would break up all intelligible 
connection in nature, inasmuch as any cause which was effi- 
cient for other than its own effect must leave all intermedi- 



278 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

ate effects unconnected by any cause. Nature would have 
some changes which were not connected in any develop- 
ment of nature. A nature of things can never admit of 
progress per saltum. 

3. Action and Reaction. — This is another pure under- 
standing-conception, and may be verified in an objective 
reality by the determination of an experience as cotempora- 
neous, or as occurrence of events simultaneously. A clear 
conception of this manner of connection will also give oc- 
casion for a further analysis by means of which some other 
a priori principles of a nature of things may be obtained. 

The conception is that of two substances in combination 
or collision, which can not occur but it must modify the 
space-filling force through every point of the space filled. 
But while such modification must be made in one substance 
from the combination, the combination must as surely mod- 
ify the other substance, and thus the change must be recip- 
rocal. And this is not merely in single instances of combi- 
nation, but inasmuch as all of a nature of things may be 
determined in the relations of one space and of one time in 
experience, it follows that all things as coexisting in space 
and time must stand in this reciprocal intercourse and com- 
munion each with each. Were some one substance isolated 
from all reciprocity with all other substances, it could not 
be determined as in the same universal space and time with 
other things, and thus could not stand connected in the 
same experience. 

This mutual commerce between all portions of the co- 
existing universe gives the occasion for perceiving the phe- 
nomena of different substances in one order and then in a 
reverse order of perception. If, when the perception of 



A PEIOEI PEINCIPLES IX NATURE. 279 

one phenomenon had passed, the phenomenon could not 
again be repeated in the sense, it would indicate that the 
modification in the substance which occasioned it had also 
passed, and a change had been induced which must now 
give occasion for the perception of some other phenomenon, 
and such succession would indicate that the connections 
were those of cause and effect, and could not admit of re- 
versed perceptions, inasmuch as all occasion for the prece- 
ding perception had wholly passed away. But when the 
apprehension of one phenomenon has passed and another 
has been apprehended, and then the apprehension of the 
first may be again repeated at pleasure, it manifests that the 
occasion for such phenomenon remains, and the order of ap- 
prehension each way is the index that the connection is that 
of reciprocal influence, not of cause and effect. When, 
therefore, all co-existing things reciprocally influence each 
other, such influence gives occasion for the same phenom- 
ena in each, so long as the modifications of any one does not 
make its changes in all. Thus, when the presence of the 
sun acts and re-acts in the modifications of its light upon all, 
my perception in the organ of vision may be from one co- 
existing substance to another, in the phenomena thus occa- 
sioned, and in a reversed order of apprehension arbitrarily, 
and I determine them as contemporaneous ; but when the 
sun is withdrawn and such action and reaction ceases, and 
such modifications have passed away, and I can no longer 
pass in my apprehension from one thing to another, I can no 
longer determine their contemporaneousness, but only the 
successions that have passed since they all disappeared. 

With this conception of the reciprocity of influence 
throughout nature, and that no one thing can be changed in 



2S0 THE UNDEESTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

its modifications but it has been acted upon by all, and that 
thus one portion of nature acts through every other portion 
while every other portion is also acting through it, we have 
the analytical judgment a priori, and thus a primitive prin- 
ciple of nature, that it can be no aggregation of particular 
things which are merely in apposition in space ; nor yet a 
mere concatenation of various series of things, in independ- 
ent lines of cause and effect ; but that while all have a per- 
petual source, and a conditioned order of succession, this 
warp of all lines of causation is also woven across with the con- 
necting woof of reciprocal influences, and thus that nature 
has its complete contexture which may be held as one web 
of a determined experience, and Avhich no more adheres 
continuously than it also coheres transversely. 

And, lastly, the conception of a vacuum, is of a space 
destitute of any force as substantial source, cause, or recip- 
rocal influence. It is the negation of all being, and the 
affirmation of an utter vacuity in the midst of nature. And 
now such a void may be supposed, just as ideal space may 
be, but not at all consistently with a determined experience 
in space and time. If there is somewhere a rent in nature, 
which causation does not pass through, or action and reac- 
tion pass across ; then can not that chasm of vacuity be at 
all determined as any place in the one objective space, nor 
any period in the one objective time ; nor can the threads 
that may run along in it, or come up from it, be possibly 
determined as in the same one whole of space and time with 
each other. The understanding has no connective notion by 
which to carry its thought across it, and once to sink into 
it would be to lose all possibility of coming out of it. The 
functions of an understanding would be lost in it. Nature 



A PRIORI PRINCIPLES IN NATURE. 281 

not merely abhors but utterly forbids, within itself, a 
vacuum. 

With the phenomenal as sense-conception already given, 
we may now completely apprehend the Understanding in 
the entire province through which all its possible functions 
may operate, and in this we have attained the perfect Idea. 
Phenomena are given in their definite but also isolate singu- 
larity, and no possible function of the sense can connect 
them in an experience as belonging to a universal nature. 
This must be a work exclusively for an understanding, which, 
by an operation of connection discursively through the 
notional, holds all nature to be one concrete of universal 
being. The possibility of determining the phenomenal in 
all the space and time-relations affords an a priori distinction 
between all subjective idealism and objective being ; for, 
except as phenomena stand connected in their constant sub- 
stance there can be no determination of them in the one 
immensity of space, and except as they stand also connected 
in their perpetual source, their successive cause, and their 
reciprocal influence, there can be no determination of them 
in the one eternity of time. A determined experience in 
space and time is utterly impossible except through such 
connections. The media of space and of time give the occa- 
sion for a complete demonstration of the necessity of the 
notional as connective for the phenomenal, in order to any 
possible experience determined in space and time. 

From this a priori demonstration of the connection of 
all possible experience determined in space and time through 
a notiomal as the being of things in themselves, we have the 
valid synthetical judgments in their universality and neces- 
sity of comprehension — that qualities must inhere in their 



282 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

substances — events must depend on their sources — effects 
must adhere through their causes — and all concomitant 
phenomena must cohere in their reciprocal influences — and 
thus all of Nature be possible to become an experience 
determined in space and time. A perpetual impenetrability- 
will indicate the being of Substance, in its position in space 
and duration in time ; a continual and irreversible order of 
apprehension will indicate the being of Cause ; and an order 
of apprehension reversible at pleasure will indicate the being 
of Reciprocal Influence. An Understanding thus, is a 
faculty for connecting phenomena in a determined experi- 
ence in space and time, through the notions of substance, 
cause, and reciprocal influence. The complete Idea concisely 
expressed is — The Tinder standing is Faculty for a univer- 
sally determined Experience in the connection of the phe- 
nomenal through the notional. 



SECTION" VI. 

FALSE SYSTEMS OF A UNIVERSAL NATURE EXPOSED IN 
THEIR DELUSIVE A PRIORI CONDITIONS. 

A complete idea of an understanding induces at once a 
conception of the true Intellectual System of the Universe. 
Its application to all false systems will enable us to detect 
their fallacies at the very point of their departure from the 
conditions of the understanding itself, and thereby to trace 
their self-contradictions and absurdities to the source in 
which they become unintelligible. It will be the conclusion 
of this first Chapter of the understanding when, in this sec- 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF NATURE EXPOSED. 283 

tion, we have applied our idea of an understanding to 
several erroneous conceptions of a Universal System of 
Nature, and thereby exposed their fallacies in their a priori 
sources. 

From the earliest history of philosophy, we find the 
traces of a very earnest conflict perpetually occurring be- 
tween those who have restricted nature wholly within the 
phenomenal, and those who have affirmed a notional as alto- 
gether beyond the region of the phenomenal, and wholly 
supersensible. The authority of Plato settles the great anti- 
quity and the ardor of this contest. In the Sophista he 
affirms that " there seems to arise among them, in this dis- 
pute concerning being a kind of giant-battle." Guest. "The 
one party from the heavenly or unseen sphere draw all 
things down to Earth, just as the old giants grasped with 
their hands the rocks and oaks. Being ever in contact with 
such things as these, they affirm that that alone which offers 
touch and impact is real being. Hence they define matter 
and substance as the same, and as for any other things, 
should one maintain that the incorporeal truly is, they 
despise it altogether and will hear to nothing of the kind." 

Theat. " Hard fellows these of whom you speak. I 
think I have met with some of them." 

Guest. " Therefore it is that those who contend against 
them are very careful to draw their armor from the unseen 
sphere. These talk of " intelligibles" and " incorporeals," 
vehemently maintaining that they alone are real being. The 
" corporeals" of the other class, what they call truth and 
reality (viz., their rocks and oaks), these break up into 
atoms, thus showing that instead of being entitled to the 
name of essence or substance they are but ever-flowing and 



284 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

changing appearance. Between these parties, O, Theatetus ! 
there is waged a war that knows no end." Aristotle, though 
philosophizing more concerning the phenomenal than the 
notional, yet no less explicitly than Plato, teaches an essence 
supersensible; separable from all phenomena; a substance 
indissoluble and indestructible. And certainly, this ever- 
lasting battle between the sensualists and super-sensualists 
can never be composed to peace except by an a priori 
science. The impossibility of an experience determined in 
space and time, except as the phenomena stand connected in 
their grounds and sources of being as substance, cause, and 
reciprocal agency, must be demonstrated, or we can never 
fully settle the controversy, and show that the phenomenal 
is the mode in the sense of that which, as thing itself, is the 
notional in the understanding. 

But this idea of an understanding determining experi- 
ence in space and time, is much further available for the 
exposing of many fallacies and philosophical delusions which 
have very much multiplied themselves about this operation 
of connecting the phenomenal in universal judgments by 
the interposition of a notion in the understanding. The 
great difficulty, as before noticed, lies in the verification of a 
synthetical judgment. This is readily effected in all cases 
where, by a construction of the conception, we can bring all 
its relations within an intuition. But when we are to judge 
of existence and not of appearance ; of things and not of 
qualities ; of inherent connections and not of external appo- 
sitions ; all construction in an intuition is out of the ques- 
tion. Our philosophical principle can not be made a mathe- 
matical axiom. The judgment is synthetical but necessarily 
discursive, and the only possible method for verifying its 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF NATURE EXPOSED. 285 

validity is by subjecting it to the demonstration, that the con- 
nectives of the notional are a necessary condition for deter- 
mining all experience in one whole of space and of time. 
In this we have the true and complete idea of an under- 
standing. But these fallacies and delusions have originated 
from a method of philosophizing, that completely excluded 
all consideration of these necessary conditions. The nature 
of a discursive synthetical judgment was wholly overlooked, 
and thus, instead of applying all the force of an a priori 
intellectual investigation to the point of verifying the valid- 
ity of the notional and the conclusions in the judgments 
thus connected, there has arisen the various attempts to 
attain to a Universal System of Nature, sometimes by an 
analytical process ; sometimes by an arbitrary generaliza- 
tion ; sometimes by mere assumption on the ground of com- 
mon sense ; and sometimes by the arbitrary omnipotence of 
divine interpositions. 

The delusions we would here seek to dispel may be 
found in the ambiguity, on one side, of using the phenome- 
nal as if it were a valid notional ; or, on the other side, 
explaining the notional in its use by only the characteristics 
of the phenomenal. One intellectualizes the phenomenon, 
and then philosophizes as if this were a true notion in the 
understanding; the other sensualizes the notion, and then 
proceeds as if no substratum in an understanding were at 
all necessary. The understanding is made to conjoin, or 
the sense to connect ; and from these opposite fallacies, phi- 
losophy has been involved in the grossest absurdities. 
Either Atheism or Pantheism must be the conclusion of all 
such processes of thinking in judgments, and it may be one 
as readily as the other. If the philosophy elevate the phe- 



286 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

nomenal to a notional, it may keep out of sight that any 
supernatural connective is wanted ; or, in the manifest emp- 
tiness of all thinking without a verified notional, it may ar- 
bitrarily introduce the supernatural simply because it is 
wanted ; yet when so introduced as the connective in na- 
ture, it is impossible that its divinity should be any thing 
other than nature. 

It is not a little amusing to watch the delusions induced 
by this ambiguous use of the phenomenal and the notional, 
from the position we have now attained, and see how the 
philosophy is forced to balance itself by an amphiboly, in 
which the ball is made to play from hand to hand according 
to the delusion which it is obliged to practice upon itself. 
We will pass the varieties of these two ambiguous uses of 
the sense and the understanding before us, sufficiently ex- 
tended to detect their ever recurring fallacies ; and this not 
so much for our amusement as to expose the ambiguity and 
dispel the delusion it has occasioned. The first sublimates 
the phenomenal to a notional in the understanding, and the 
last degrades the notional to a phenomenal in the sense. 
By keeping this examination ever within the light of our a 
priori Idea for all possible thinking in judgments, the de- 
tection of the deceptive ambiguity will be readily effected. 

1. The general process of physical philosophy tohere the 
phenomenal is elevated into a notional for the understand- 
ing. 

The common conception of material being, as the start- 
ing point for philosophy in building up a System of the 
Universe under this general process, may be thus described. 
The material world as given in vision or by the touch is an 
extension in space, and by resistance to muscular pressure 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF NATURE EXFOSED. 287 

is apprehended as impenetrable body. This extended im- 
penetrable body is capable of successive divisibility up to 
the primitive particles of which the mass has been com- 
pounded, and such particles in their ultimate analysis are 
deemed to be the primitive elements of material nature. 
As thus uncompounded, primitive and distinct, they are 
known as atoms. The phenomenal has in these atoms dis- 
appeared, inasmuch as the analysis has gone too far to per- 
mit that there should be a content in the sense, and that, 
which from its sublimation has passed out of the reach of 
the sensibility, is now taken to be valid thing in the thought. 
And here the first fallacy, the npurov ipevdog, is found. 
This sublimated phenomenal, as having passed from the sen- 
sibility, is no longer considered to be phenomenal, but is in- 
tellectualized into the essential being of matter as thing in 
itself. 

And now, with all matter given in its atomic elements, 
the labor of philosophically accounting for its combinations 
and systematic connections commences. How are these 
atoms combined in a body ? How are bodies brought into 
system ? How are systems held together as one universe ? 
Here is the salient point for many diversified modifications 
of this general process of philosophizing. A few of the 
more prominent will cursorily be noticed. 

(1.) There is an Atheistic scheme, according to which 
an attempt has been made to build up a system of Nature, 
that dates far back among the earliest annals of Grecian 
philosophizing, assigned to such names as Leucippus, Demo- 
critus, and Protagoras, but which can hardly claim to pos- 
sess more than a semblance of systematic philosophy. The 
atoms were assumed to have not only position and hardness 



288 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

but weight ; and thus a fall of all atoms in the void space 
gave to matter an original motion in space. With these 
primordial atoms in motion, it was deemed a necessary con- 
sequence that resistances, percussions, collisions, and attri- 
tions should ensue ; and thus aggregations of atoms would 
be induced, which would be bodies of diverse magnitudes, 
shapes, and movements in space. And inasmuch as such 
aggregations must take to themselves some position, and 
stand to each other in some relationship of figure, motion, 
density, etc. ; and as the present actual composition of na- 
ture is one among the indefinite number of possible arrange- 
ments ; it is only required that we admit the component 
atoms to have come together as they have, and this fortuit- 
ous concurrence has made nature what it is. -There needed 
only primitive atoms enough, and their own weight put 
them in motion, and the present system of the universe has 
come into its own arrangement, and quite as readily this as 
any other among all possible combinations. 

But aside from all questions of the origination of the 
atoms, and of their diffusion through the void, the false no- 
tional at once appears in the assumption of weight as an 
inherent property of the atoms, to give motion to them. 
The weight is solely phenomenal in the sense, but is surrep- 
titiously used as if it were an intrinsic force, and thus a 
notional in the understanding. The deficiency at once dis- 
closes itself when there is any attempt to determine from it 
how the atoms should come together, and how when aggre- 
gated they can have any cohesion. 

(2.) Epicurus, who lived amid the light diffused by the 
Socratic philosophy and the physical investigations of Aris- 
totle, modified the atomic theory of Democritus to meet 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF NATURE EXPOSED. 289 

some very manifest difficulties. He assumed the atoms to 
be immutable so that the weight and motion might have 
permanency, and that their number must be infinite, or in 
the infinite void a finite number must become dissipated and 
lost to each other in a disorderly movement. The void 
offers no resistance and the atoms must thus be precipitated 
with equal velocities and unvarying direction, and hence can 
no more come into conjunction than if each were falling in 
its own separate tube. Hence, Epicurus assumed an arbi- 
trary inner energy that occasionally made slight deviations 
from an even and perpendicular fall. These arbitrary de- 
flections aggregate the atoms into an infinity of worlds sim- 
ilar and dissimilar to our own, and amid the perpetual col- 
liding, repelling, and rebounding, Nature comes to have 
combinations of form, place, and motion which now belong 
to it. 

Here the false play of the weight of the atoms is noticed, 
and as the theory stands unbalanced the ball is changed 
into the empty hand to restore the equilibrium. The weight 
is solely phenomenal though deceptively used as a notional, 
and when the philosophy rests upon it for aggregating the 
atoms, the whole turns awry, for the phenomenal weight 
has no conditioning directory. The amphibolous play 
gives the arbitrary deflection to the losing side, and the reel- 
ing thought is steadied to take the step which may bring 
the atoms in juxtaposition in divers places and quantities. 
Here Epicurus stopped short ; but a next attempt for a dis- 
cursive judgment must have repeated the delusion. This 
arbitrary deflective energy was still phenomenal, like the 
flickering appearance of flame, or the zigzag motion of the 
lightning, and can possibly give nothing to stand under our 

13 



290 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

thinking. This fallacy of a false notional might everlast- 
ingly thus delude us, and we abide amid only the construc- 
tions of the sense though assuming to conclude in the phi- 
losophical judgments of the understanding. 

(3.) A modification of the use of the phenomenal for the 
notional is found in the physical system of the Stoics. Zeno, 
Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, were the most noted among the 
founders of the philosophy of the Porch. Heraclitus flour- 
ished before the Socratic Era, but many of his principles 
and conclusions were adopted by the Stoics. 

The incorporeal essences of Plato and Aristotle were 
rejected by the Stoics, and all true being was held to lie only 
in the corporeal. This was, however, made more compre- 
hensive than the atomic aggregates of Democritus or Epi- 
curus. To the phenomenal body of matter was ascribed 
both a passive and an active state. The weight and the 
inner deflective agencies of the Epicurean philosophers, the 
Stoical philosophy ascribed to matter in its active state. As 
abstract generalizations, a vacuum, place, time, and merely 
logical conclusions were incorporeal, but when cognized as 
definite particulars they were considered to be corporeal. 
A definite cubic foot in space rested permanently in itself 
and was thus passive, but it excluded all other extension 
from its place and was thus active, and the particular pure 
place was thus as truly body as the empirical content. 

The analysis of the phenomenal matter was not into the 
indivisible atoms, but into its quality and quantity. The 
quality was passive as the abiding, and the quantity was 
active as giving to itself limits and shape. The phenomenal 
properties were themselves body, and more than one body 
might occupy the same place at the same time. The hard- 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF XATUEE EXPOSED. 291 

ness of a cubic inch of gold, and the yellowness of it were 
both body, having content and form, passion and action, 
and yet both in the same place at once. The analysis was 
only of what appeared, but this as both content and form. 
The content was the passive side, and the form the active 
side, the first was matter and the last was spirit. But both 
the matter and spirit were in the one body, the spirit de- 
veloping bodily form, the matter being developed into form. 
Thus the seed can not be developed but by its active spirit, 
and the spirit can develope nothing except as in a material 
germ, and the body of the plant has both matter and spirit, 
the passive and the active. God and the soul are spirit, and 
in their activity the universe and humanity are developed 
in bodily form. God, as the informing icord (GTrepfidrtKog 
Xoyoc) of the universe, must reside in the matter of nature 
which He develops into bodily form, and in this constant 
development there is perpetual flow and change. This 
active, moreover, works in the passive, and in this non- 
resistance there can be no conditioning of the activity for 
there is no reciprocity of agency. It was not the chance of 
the Epicurean, as a deflective phenomenon with no inherent 
efficiency ; nor the proper causality of two modifying no- 
tional substances ; but the Stoical Fate, as an activity with 
no determining conditions to guide it. 

And yet such a peculiar analysis of the phenomenal and 
its results brings at once into use the same play of a delusive 
notional. Because, in constructing form, the intellect as 
constructing agent is active, it is here assumed the phenom- 
enal form is bodily activity, and this is assumed to give 
dynamical connections. But so soon as this is used for con- 
necting in judgments, the false notional betrays itself, and 



292 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

the active as solely phenomenal must again be remanded to a 
further activity back of itself, and be compounded with mat- 
ter. We then attempt to think the active as developing the 
material into bodily form, but at once we lose our balance 
again, for the matter in which the active is, and on which it 
is to work, and out of which as source is to come all bodily 
forms is utterly passive ; a negation of all conditioning of 
the working, and leaving the active as mere blind Fate. 
But, as such a conception negates all intelligence and anni- 
hilates the understanding itself, the speculative Stoic throws 
the ball once more back and makes the activity as spirit to 
be itself moved by a higher activity, and which is but the 
double absurdity of making fate to be fated. Here the 
stoical philosophy rested, on a blind activity unconditionally 
controlling gods, and men, and nature. There was a blind 
power back of the universal agent, standing behind the 
throne and controlling Jove himself. The whole was a vain 
attempt to think in the sense, and make discursive judg- 
ments by phenomenal analyses. 

(4.) Pythagoras lived more than a hundred years before 
Socrates, and his name is connected with the earliest sys- 
tems of philosophy extant. It is quite evident that he had 
a very full acquaintance with the ancient Egyptian philoso- 
phy and sciences, and may perhaps in many things be taken 
as a representative of the Egyptian method of thinking. It 
is only from the writers of the Pythagorean school who 
lived immediately precedent to the time of Socrates, that 
we attain a knowledge of the Pythagorean doctrine ; as it is 
evidently from these that Plato and Aristotle drew their 
descriptions of this philosophy. These were mainly Philo- 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF NATURE EXPOSED. 293 

laus, Eurytus, and Archytas, the first of which, more espe- 
cially, gave shape to the Pythagorean system. 

Their whole system is clothed in a mathematical garb, 
and their conceptions of things are expressed in the formula 
of numbers. Their first principle is " that number is the 
essence of all things ;" and as all numbers have their com- 
binations, and their relations in such constructions in a gen- 
eral harmony, and also express the relations of tones and 
give the ratios of musical intervals, so a principle nearly 
equivalent to the above was, " that all things exist through 
harmony." But the real meaning clothed in this mathemati- 
cal dress is all we now need, in its most summary form, for 
the purpose of detecting another phase of that delusive am- 
phiboly before noticed between the phenomenal and the 
notional. The process of this philosophy was wholly analy- 
tical, but in a different direction from the Atomists, or the 
Stoics in the passive and active of bodies. The phenomenal 
alone was used in discursive thinking, and which must have 
induced for synthetical judgments some double use of the 
phenomenal as a spurious notional ; and this it is our design 
here to expose. The analysis proceeded in this direction : 
taking the phenomenal body as having length, breadth, and 
thickness in space, we have, as a first analytical result, sur- 
faces ; and when we further analyze surfaces, we have lines ; 
and when we analyze lines, we have ultimately points. 
Points, as the ultimate analysis, are atoms. But these 
atoms or points are only limits, and not limited. In order 
that there should be a finite or limited body, there must be 
the point with an interval terminated by another point. All 
bodies are thus originally points and intervals, or atoms 
separated by a vacuum. The one point in vacuo is an atom; 



294 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

two points, with their intervening vacuum, is a line ; three 
points and their interval, when not continuous, is a surface ; 
and four points, when any one is out of the plane of the 
other, is a solid. Here is the explanation in what way, " the 
essence of things is number." The unit is an atom ; the 
dual, a line ; the triplicate, a surface ; and the quadruple, a 
solid. Definite numbers are also given for cubes, pentagons, 
hexagons, etc. 

The system of nature is constituted of these elements of 
atoms and intervals ; i. e., of points and voids. These are 
the ultimate results of an analysis of all phenomena, and all 
being is thus taken as compounded of atoms and the voids 
interposed. With these, the philosophy commences to con- 
nect its system of universal nature. A generalization of all 
atomic being, as including all existence, is termed the One ; 
and a generalization of the voids includes all the intervals 
interjacent to the atoms, and which is known as the 
Inexistent. The first One, standing in the infinite void, is 
known as the Odd ; and assumed as spontaneously tending 
to a self-limitation by an inhaling of the circumjacent void 
within itself, which is called the inspiration of the Infinite ; 
and this bringing of the infinite void into the One makes it 
to be compounded, extended, self-conscious, and all-compris- 
ing ; and is in this the supreme force and essence of the 
universe now called the odd-even — inasmuch as the limit- 
ing atom and the separating interval are now in unity within 
itself. Here now, as a triad, is in this odd-even the capacity 
for the beginning, the middle, and the end ; and as thus 
including the entire elements of being it becomes the All. 
The All is now competent to divide and separate itself inde- 
finitely by inhaling the void between the atoms, and thus 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF NATURE EXPOSED. 295 

extending and limiting itself and thereby distinguishing in 
self-consciousness ; and this limiting itself in its distinct and 
definite portions secures that it becomes Uranus, or the 
world. The different elements of nature — as fire, air, earth, 
water — are the products of different compounds of atoms 
and intervals, and which have their expression in numbers ; 
and the arrangement of all was with a cube or a pyramid of 
fire, as the altar of the universe and the watch-tower of 
Jupiter, at the center ; and from which goes constantly out 
the flame which pervades and encloses the worlds, and con- 
stitutes the grand vortices in which all the discriminated 
compounds of atoms and voids are kept perpetually moving 
about in their orbits. This movement was after the law of 
harmony, and supposed to be attended by sounds too sub- 
lime for mortal ears to hear, but which to the gods were the 
perpetually ravishing music of the spheres. 

Now, without inquiring into the genesis of the primary 
atoms, and which, by inhaling the void and thereby being 
rendered capable of self-conscious limitations, become mo- 
nads ; and not at all seeking the validity of the generaliza- 
tion, which can give only an ideal unity to the atoms as the 
Supreme One, and an ideal combination of the one existent 
and the infinite inexistent as the odd-even or the all ; we 
only need to trace, in the light of the true idea of an under- 
standing, the ambiguity here involved, and all the delusion 
is at once exposed in its primary sources. The atom even 
as generalized to the universal One, is but the phenomenal 
carried beyond all perception and made a pure intuition ; 
and this, taken from the field of the sense, is assumed to 
have entered the field of the understanding and thereby a 
mere intuition is delusively used as a notion. But when 



296 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

the thinking discursively commences, the false notional has 
no subsistency, and hence to save the fall, the ball must be 
thrown into the empty hand as a higher assumed notional, 
which is a force seeking after a self-conscious limitation. 
The atom has thus an inner causation which moves it, and 
in this way has become again phenomenon, and the inhaling 
or self-limiting energy has been put as the connecting no- 
tional. But this again, though assumed as the supreme 
governing force of the universe, inasmuch as it may act only 
upon the passive void which it inhales into itself has no force 
nor reaction, and thus can give no connection to the atoms. 
So soon therefore as the mundane force is to be used for 
connecting the combined atoms into a universe, to save the 
fall again the ball must be thrown forward as a newly as- 
sumed notional in the vortices of the central fire which is 
made to pervade the spheres, and to float them about in its 
gyrations. 

Here the Pythagorean system stops short, but it is quite 
as little self-balanced as before it commenced its delusive 
philosophizing ; for the next step upon the vortices must at 
once make them to be as truly phenomenal as the spheres 
which they carry about, and we must still seek another bal- 
ance-weight in some new notional which shall condition the 
gyrations of the flaming vortices. The philosophy can not 
be completed, because an analysis of phenomena can never 
supply an understanding-cognition, as true notional connec- 
tive, 

(5.) Another modification of the atomic theory, to pro- 
vide for this defect in the impossibility of an ultimate analy- 
sis, is effected by Descartes ; and would fill up the void in 
the notional by at once interposing the supernatural. The 



FALSE SYSTEMS OP NATURE EXPOSED. 297 

outline of the Cartesian physical philosophy is as follows : 
Material being has its essence in extension. All external 
phenomena are in some way qualities of extension, and thus 
only different modes of extended being, while the simple 
extension itself is the sole essence. This indefinite exten- 
sion, as the original essence of the material universe, is sepa- 
rable and moveable, and therefore capable of a division into 
definite parts. The first modification of material essence 
was the breaking up of this indefinite extension into angular 
portions, and which in the movement of their breaking up 
pressed against and were made to grind upon each other, 
and this attrition rounded the fractured parts into small 
spherical atoms. Interposed between these small spherical 
atoms, was every where the still finer dust which worked 
off in the grinding. This finer dust is the first component 
element of nature, and the spherical atoms are the second 
element. 

The original disruption of the mass and the consequent 
concussions occasioned whirls and eddies, in which the finer 
dust of the first element was carried about in different vor- 
tices ; and this prepares the way for the philosophical con- 
nection of the elements into a system, and which is thus 
effected. The fine dust of the first element, in its exceeding 
minuteness, thus whirling about, naturally tends in its motion 
toward the foci of the vortices in which it is carried around, 
and is thus subtracted from the matter of the second ele- 
ment, leaving the spherical atoms diffused through the heav- 
ens, and which, as thus cleansed from all the floating dust, 
become the medium of light. The first element, so far as 
carried into the foci of the vortices, becomes there condensed 
and steadfast in position except as turning about its own 

13* 



298 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

center, and thus constitutes the different suns of the differ- 
ent vortical systems. And yet very much of this fine mat- 
ter of the first element tended to cohere ere it reached the 
centers of the vortices, and such incipient coherences be- 
come a third element, more dense than the spherical atoms 
of light as the second element, and according to its different 
densities came together in masses at different points in the 
vortices from the suns at the center, and formed the planets 
and comets as they are carried about in their respective sys- 
tems. In process of time the larger vortices absorbed the 
smaller and controlled them in its own, and the satellites 
while carried about their primaries were all carried about 
in the great solar vortex ; and thus our solar system, and in 
like manner all other systems of the universe, became com- 
pletely established in their bodies and their revolutions. 

And now, all this, as in the Pythagorean system, is 
wholly phenomenal, so far as the being, figure, arrangement, 
and revolution of the material world is considered. Exten- 
sion is solely a sense-conception, and thus the very being of 
matter is given only in the sense, and the understanding 
supplies no notional at all as a connective. The Cartesian 
philosophy can know nothing of substance and' cause as 
space-filling force existing in nature, and even the negative 
of substance as a vacuum is an impossible conception. Des- 
cartes thus reasons against the possibility of a vacuum — that 
if there were any such thing it might be measured, and all 
measure implies extension, and all extension is essential mat- 
ter, and thus no vacuum can be. And in this, precisely, is its 
peculiarity. Altogether unlike the Pythagorean philosophy, 
when it has analyzed the phenomenal and found its highest 
analytical predicate in the conception of extension, and de- 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF NATURE EXPOSED. 299 

oied that any extension can be a void but must be material 
essence, and thus wholly phenomenal ; it does not, like that, 
attempt to sublimate the phenomenal into a notional. Des- 
cartes had already provided for such want, in beforehand 
preparing for himself a connnective wholly supernatural, 
and which allowed that he should utterly dispense with all 
function of an understanding, and connect directly by the 
reason. The phenomenal is held together not through sub- 
stance and cause, but immediately by the Deity. Indeed, 
that the phenomenal can at all be known to be, depends 
upon ha ing first demonstrated the spiritual to be ; and all 
physical science originates in the previous science of Theol- 
ogy. This, so peculiar a method of building up a nature of 
things by makings its whole connective supernatural — and 
yet in such a way, as we shall see, that an amphiboly intro- 
duces its delusive play in another form though as really as 
in any of the preceding which has been noticed — demands 
that we carefully examine it, and be able to make a fair ex- 
position of its fallacies. 

Cartesianism, then, begins in universal doubt, and seeks 
for a first verified truth. In this very casting about for 
what may dispel all doubt, there is an action which may be 
called thought ; and in this very thinking, there is an awak- 
ing in self-consciousness. Thus, in the thought itself, the 
mind becomes cognizant of its own being. Here, then, is 
the first truth for all possible science — I think, and in think- 
ing I cognize my own existence. " Cogito ergo sum." 
Having thus the existence of mind, and having found that 
this mind has many thoughts, which are named all as alike 
ideas, it makes clearness and distinctness the criterion of the 
truth of Our ideas ; and then finds this one grand idea as 



300 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

more obtrusive, absorbing, and unavoidable in the clearness 
of its presence than all others, viz., an all-perfect Infinite 
Being. Such an idea, so controlling and necessary, could 
not be in the mind from the mind itself nor from any other 
source, except as it originates in the actual existence of this 
all-perfect Being himself. The prominence, clearness, and 
necessity of the idea of a God is proof a priori of the 
actual existence of a God. Thus the thinking soul is, and 
God is. 

And now the sense gives us an outer world ; but the 
sense can verify nothing, and only make phenomena to 
appear. But we have already cognized an all-perfect Being, 
and His veracity must be manifested in His works. The 
outer world, therefore, exists, or God has falsified His own 
veracity in making man the subject of perpetual and help- 
less deception. The truth that the outer world is, rests 
upon the truth that God is, and that His works do not 
deceive. In this way we come to the demonstration of an 
outer world as phenomenal reality. This outer world is 
then, in the last analysis, found to be extension ; and this, 
as the essence of all matter, is brought into its present 
arrangement as system of the universe, according to the 
foregoing process of the atoms in the vortices. 

Thought is the Cartesian essence of mind, and extension 
that of matter, and in these is included all possible being. 
They are utterly unlike, and can have no reciprocal com- 
munion with each other. No connection is to be thought 
between them, as if one could act upon or be affected by 
the other. The essence of matter is wholly inert ; thought 
only is active. And in this is the provision made for all the 
dynamical connections in nature. The breaking up of the 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF NATURE EXPOSED. 301 

inert essence of matter, the attrition into the first and second 
elements, the vortical revolutions and the connections of 
finite mind with matter, are all resolved into the immediate 
interposition of the Deity. The doctrine of " Divine Assist- 
ance " is made to account for all the movement and changes 
of nature. 

And here, so far as the physical connection of the phe- 
nomenal universe is regarded, this philosophy has the merit 
of a logical consistency. It does not as in the preceding, 
attempt by an analysis of material phenomena to attain a 
notional in the understanding, by which to connect into a 
judgment a nature of things. The connective is supplied 
in another manner, and the supernatural is immediately in- 
troduced as the constituting force on which a system of 
nature depends. But, though not in the same direction as 
in the former theories, yet still from another quarter a simi- 
lar ambiguity is introduced, and a delusion is effected which 
is to be dispelled by applying the true idea of an under- 
standing. The false notional is not at all attempted from 
the material, but is derived from the spiritual phenomenon. 
The whole Cartesian philosophy founds upon Thought, as 
its first given fact. The phenomenon of thinking induces 
consciousness, and this is made evidential of a self, or an 
Ego, which thinks. That I have self-consciousness in think- 
ing is taken as valid that I have in this, myself, as notional 
subject of thinking. Self-consciousness is sublimated into 
an understanding cognition of a permanent substance, as 
the causal source of thought. Here, then, is the first decep- 
tive ambiguity. The thinking in consciousness is wholly 
phenomenal ; and an analysis of the exercise in the thinking 
and of the thought as product, and one put as the subjec- 



302 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

tive and the other as the objective, deludes into the convic- 
tion that the supersensual subject Ego is truly attained. 
And then the speculation is still further advanced, that inas- 
much as the analysis of the subjective can be carried no 
higher, therefore the Ego, as soul, is simple, indivisible, and 
immortal. 

But, inasmuch as the soul, which is thus surreptitiously 
assumed as the understanding cognition and permanent 
notional source for all thinking, can be source only for the 
thinking as inner phenomenon, and not at all source for the 
phenomena of an outer world, and therefore no knowledge 
of a nature of things can be attained through such connec- 
tions ; the philosophy returns to the phenomenal thought, 
and demonstrates the being and connections of an outward 
nature of things by another and entirely independent pro- 
cess. One thought as product is separated in an analysis 
from the thinking as intellectual activity, and because it is 
more prominent, absorbing, and necessary than all others, is 
taken to be more distinct and clear than any, and on this 
account the most true and valid of any, viz., that of an All- 
Perfect Being ; and in this assumed validity of existence 
from the necessity of the idea, the being and perfections of 
God are considered as a priori demonstrated. The phenom- 
enal in the inner sense is made available here, not merely for 
a notional source of thinking, as self or soul, but taking the 
though, as product, is made available for attaining immed'- 
ately the supernatural as substantial ground for the thought; 
and the phenomenal is at once elevated to the divine. The 
sense is made to perform the functions of the reason. 

But inasmuch, again, as the philosophy needs only a 
physical substratum and connection, so this Deity, assumed 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF NATUEE EXPOSED. 303 

to be from the clearness of the thought of the All-perfect, is 
used only as philosophical source for constituting a universal 
system of nature, and degraded to a mere physical force, as 
cause in an understanding cognition, for breaking up the 
original essence somehow unaccountably generated, and 
grinding it into its atomic elements, and whiling the subtle 
vortices which are to shape all things in their individual 
forms and systematic revolutions. While avoiding the 
absurdities of attaining its false notional connectives from a 
sublimation of the outer phenomena, it runs into even more 
gross fallacies and violent subreptions, in attempting delu- 
sively to attain its notional connectives wholly through a 
sublimation of the inner phenomena. The ambiguity of the 
phenomenal for the notional is the same as in the former 
theories examined, and the fallacy heightened in absurdity by 
elevating the phenomenal immediately to the supernatural, 
and then degrading the divinity of the supernatural to the 
bondage and perpetual servitude of the natural. The Deity 
is needed only for holding nature to its place. 

Malebranche simply carried forward Cartesianism to its 
ultimate results, without the addition of any important new 
principle ; and the necessity for supernatural interpositions 
in nature became with him a completed doctrine of " Occa- 
sional causes," and the vision of all things in the Deity, and 
a resting of all evidence of the reality of an outer world 
upon divine Revelation. 

(6.) Spinoza so far modified this philosophy in its founda- 
tion-principles as to make indeed a new system of the phy- 
sical universe. The two essences of thought and extension 
which had been conceived as so heterogeneous that they 
could not come into communion, and hence demanded 



304 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

supernatural interpositions, were by Spinoza generalized 
and identified in a higher essence, which was assumed as 
ultimate, indivisible, and eternally immutable, and thus the 
Absolute Substance. God is not a personality, acting accord- 
ing to the imperatives of reason in view of final ends ; but 
a simple essence, in the absoluteness of its own being 
developing a nature of things in the perpetual unfolding of 
itself. Extension and thought are merely analytical concep- 
tions of this infinite substance in which they are identical. 
The absolute essence is both infinite thought and infinite 
extension, and thus all mind and all matter are but the modi- 
fied development and modes of existence of the All-Perfect 
Being. A supernatural interposition is not needed to con- 
stitute and hold together a nature of things ; the supernatu- 
ral is developed into nature itself. An unfolding Deity is 
the universe. 

And here Spinozism is unquestionably more philosophi- 
cally consistent than Cartesianism. It does not attempt to 
explain nature by getting a supernatural a priori to it, and 
then absorbing all of nature in this supernatural ; but entirely 
reversing the process, it goes through nature up to the abso- 
lute substance, and then accounts for nature by evolving it 
from the ' absolute. Both may be termed Pantheistic ; but 
Descartes's God is diffused as causality through nature, and 
Spinoza's God is the substance which in its own development 
becomes nature. But, in this last, there is the same ambig- 
uous use of the phenomenal for the notional — a delusive 
substitution of the functions of the sense for the functions 
of the understanding — and thus attempting to think in dis- 
cursive synthetical judgments with no valid medium 
through which to make the discursus, and therefore no 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF NATURE EXPOSED. 305 

valid connection in which to legitimate the conclusion in a 
judgment. 

The thought and extension are simply the sublimations 
of the phenomenal, and not at all a valid notional supplied 
in the understanding ; and instead of vainly attempting to 
think them into a nature of things by the interposition of 
whirling vortices, which again are but interpositions of 
supernatural agency, the attempt, equally as vain, is made 
to think them into connection by a higher sublimation of 
the phenomenal, and assuming it to be a valid substance as 
notion in the understanding, and then arbitrarily educing a 
nature of things from it, merely by a development of it. Let 
it be demanded to think in a judgment a connected order 
for this development, and all the philosophy of Spinoza is 
wholly impotent. It will then require a further sublimation 
of this assumed notional as absolute substance, and which is 
no more space-filling force, as substance, cause, and reciprocal 
influence, than the phenomenal thought and extension them- 
selves. It stops with this assumed substance, but it is a 
mere delusive stopping-place ; for philosophy as much 
demands an intelligent development of nature in a condi- 
tioning source, as a resting of nature upon an ultimate sub- 
stance. Only a true idea of an understanding verifying its 
notional in a determined experience in the space and time- 
relations can do this. 

(7.) The genius of Leibnitz, penetrating, powerful, and 
comprehensive beyond that of most philosophers, appre- 
hended clearly the difficulties in the Cartesian system, and 
that they were still left unresolved in all the modifications 
of Spinozism ; and in a manner evincive of the superiority 
of his intellect, he set himself to work a reformation in the 



306 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

very first principles of this philosophizing. But, manifestly, 
from the want of a true idea of an understanding in its 
operation of discursive connection, he only modified the sys- 
tem, but did not at all change the order of the thinking. It 
is still an attempt to sublimate the phenomenal to a notional, 
and to think a universal connection in a nature of things by 
only notionalizing the phenomenal. The acuteness and fer- 
tility of his mind is astonishing, but in the absence of the 
true light, it only changed the point of the delusive ambig- 
uity, and still retained all the false play of the deceptive 
amphiboly before noticed. 

The grand difficulty in the Cartesian system was the 
inertness of all physical essence. Causation could nowhere 
be used as a connective in nature itself, but must every 
where be superinduced upon nature, and thus perpetually 
demanding the supernatural. Nor did Spinoza's generaliza- 
tion of all thought and extension into the different modes 
of one assumed absolute substance help this difficulty. It 
gave a specious unity to nature, but provided for no intelli- 
gible exposition of the successive on-going in the changes of 
nature. A substantial ground was assumed, but because it 
was only a sublimation of the phenomenal, it could give no 
understanding-cognition of force as a cause for change in a 
space-filling substance, and which -might thereby condition 
an alteration of the phenomena in the sense. This deficiency 
was to be supplied, and somehow the notion of causality 
introduced into nature. This is the leading interest in the 
Leibnitzian physics, and the stand-point from whence to take 
an examination of this philosophy ; and yet we shall find 
this causality to be merely an intellectualizing of the sense, 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF NATUEE EXPOSED. 307 

though with much ingenuity, and giving much plausibility 
to the fallacy. 

The analysis of matter which Leibnitz assumed to be 
always given to us compounded, w T as the first step, and from 
this the atomic theory was necessarily adopted. The last 
analysis attained to an indivisible, indissoluble portion ; and 
this atom, as thus wholly unextended and impossible to 
come under any outward determination, can only be distin- 
guishable from other atoms in virtue of something within 
itself. Hence the principle of "the indistinguishable" hi 
matter by any thing external. But changes are perpetually 
occurring in the atoms, and some " sufficient cause" is to be 
found for them ; and as this can not be from any outer condi- 
tioning, but must be determined from the inner, and the inner 
can have nothing of extension or composition, so nothing is 
left but that it must be distinguishable in virtue of its inher- 
ent energy. A sort of representation-force, analogous to 
that which is an inherent property of mind, must be pos- 
sessed by all atoms, and in the modifications of this only 
can one atom be determined as distinguishable from all 
others. Thus, the atoms are not inert and passive, as with 
Democritus and Descartes, but possess an inherent energy 
as power of inward representation, and in virtue of this 
inner causality they are not dead atoms, but monads. Each 
has its own particular representation-force, and in this is its 
principle of identity ; and as each also is competent from 
this inner energy to represent all others within itself, every 
monad is competent to become a little world in itself and is 
" a microcosm." Some monads have their inner representa- 
tion-force in utter unconsciousness, and are the elements of 
material nature ; others are partially awakened into con- 



308 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA, 

sciousness, and have indistinct representations, and are the 
elements of animal spirits ; and others again have this inner 
energy developed into full and distinct consciousness, and 
are the elements of the rational human soul. God is the 
absolute monad ; and His existence, we are forced from the 
laws and conditions of all thought to admit, and He stands 
as " sufficient reason" for the existence of all others. Thus, 
the elements for an intellectual system of the universe, all 
stand ready for a philosophical putting of a nature of things 
together. 

In this particular possession of inner representation- 
energy, the whole must give all possible phases of being, 
and in such universality of representation there must be 
"perfection." Inasmuch as essential monadic being can 
have no determined external relationship, but only inner 
representation, so space can be no a priori condition of na- 
ture, but wholly consequential upon its being and represen- 
tation. The representation-force is first, and space is pro- 
duced in the representation — as if to the mirror there was 
no outer, then the mirror must first be, and the represented 
space consequently produced within it. In such production 
of space there is, of course, occasion given for the position, 
figure, and relative bearings of all that the monad shall en- 
visage ; and this in the case of all monads ; and thus all 
things appear in space. But how is it that the relations 
correspond in time ? The energizing causality is wholly 
inward, and not that one monad can act outwardly upon 
another ; how, then, shall their separate and individual repre- 
sentations conform each to each ? This demanded, not the 
* the occasional causes " of Cartesianism which would re- 
quire a perpetual interposition for each case, but an original 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF NATURE EXPOSED. 309 

arrangement which should harmonize all in their representa- 
tions forever. And here is introduced the doctrine of " a 
preestablished harmony," in which all monadic representa- 
tion-forces, as so many mirrors each representing the state 
of all the others, are made to tally precisely each with each. 
The entire universe of conscious and unconscious monads 
thus go on in their inner causal representations, not from 
any community of influences reciprocally among themselves, 
but orderly and successively in their periods from the wise 
arrangement of all in an original predetermination. 

With all our interest in such surprising creations of ge- 
nius, still how amusing to watch the double-play perpetually 
going on between the sense and the understanding ! The 
sense gives to us every thing compounded and thus con- 
fused ; and the mere analysis of this, according to this 
method of philosophizing, takes it out of the sense, and 
gives to us the things themselves in their essential being in 
the understanding. Thus the atoms become things as 
understanding-cognitions ; and yet when we would think 
them in discursive connections, we are forced further on- 
ward for our real notion of things, and must endow them 
with an inherent causal-energy. Then, inasmuch as it must 
be an analysis from sense, and we have analyzed the atom 
beyond all outer relation, we take the causal-energy from an 
analogy of what may be attained in an analysis of our inner 
phenomena, and make it to be a representation-force. And 
when we would use this as the medium for a discursive con- 
nection, it is wholly impotent, and we are again forced for- 
ward for our notional to an independent and unexplained 
pre-determination, which is the original connective for this 
harmony. The notional is ever thrown forward, and when 



310 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

we essay to step upon it, it straightway fails altogether as a 
ground for the thinking, and the judgment is ever thrust 
forward into the void, hopeless of all support. It thus, 
also, makes every principle it uses delusive. The principle 
of " the indistinguishable " is found in the use which the 
understanding makes of this false notional throughout. The 
phenomenal is analyzed beyond all outer determinations, 
and as if now it were the substantial thing in itself, its dis- 
tinction from all others is to be found in the inner only. 
Difference of identity can not be determined by place, for 
space itself is the product of a representation. The princi- 
ple of " sufficient cause " is for the same reason delusive, 
and no true notion of force can be conceived, but only har- 
monious representations. The representations can not coun- 
teract ; their opposition would be simply irregularity in 
time, as if the clock should not strike just when the hand 
points the hour. And finally, the principle of " preestab- 
lished harmony " leads to the same delusion, on the same 
account of a use of the false notional ; for this harmony is 
merely conformity of representations, not an agreement of 
interacting dynamical forces. The system is, after all, sim- 
ply the regulation for representing appearances, not the con- 
trol and arrangement of acting and resisting substances. It 
is no more a nature of things than the accordant reflections 
of two mirrors face to face. 

We will now give attention to the other method of phi- 
losophizing, viz. : 

2. That which degrades the notional to a vague phenom- 
enal, or entirely dispenses with it. 

In this order of building up a physical system, nothing 
is permitted to enter as conception of valid being which has 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF NATURE EXPOSED. 311 

not been attained through the sense. A supposed supersen- 
sual is to be held as delusory, and though accompanied by 
irresistible conviction can be determined as resting upon no 
valid basis. 

The philosophy of Locke in accounting for the origina- 
tion of all our knowledge, is the source of all this order of 
philosophizing in physics. The elements of all knowledge 
and the essence of all being are given to us according to 
Locke, through two sources only, viz. : Sensation, giving to 
us that which is material element, and Reflection, giving to 
us that which is mental element. All our simple elementary 
knowledge is thus provided for. The simple elements, pas- 
sively received, may be in various ways modified through 
the activity of the mind itself, and thus known in various 
determined relations. The mind is competent, having at- 
tained, the simple elements, to combine, compare, and ab- 
stract ; and through such mental operations we may know 
the elements as united, contrasted, and isolated. Hence our 
conceptions of double and single, even and odd, greater and 
less, higher and lower, general and particular, etc. All 
conceptions, not themselves elementary as given in the 
sense, are to be thus attained by a mental operation upon 
what is given in the sense ; and all such operation is 
confined within these three functions — combination, compar- 
ison, and abstraction. 

From what we have already gained in our former inves- 
tigation, it is manifest that all those immediate intuitions 
which are given in the definite constructions of the phenom- 
ena of sense, may in this way be accounted for ; but the 
system of Locke greatly errs in its partiality and incom- 
pleteness, in supposing that any conceptions, conditional for 



312 THE UNDEESTANDOG IN ITS IDEA. 

discursive synthetical judgments, can be thus attained. 
Conjunction may thus be effected, but not connection. Re- 
lationship in space, time, and amount, may thus be deter- 
mined ; but not the inner dynamical relationships of being 
itself. The notions of substance, cause, and reciprocal in- 
fluence, are no combinations, comparisons, nor abstractions 
of any simple elements attained in sense. Here is the grand 
defect of the sensualism of Locke. It would get along 
with only the functions of the sense. Sensation gives all 
phenomena ; reflection gives all the intuitive relations of 
phenomena; and no distinction is recognized between con- 
joining and connecting — mathematical and dynamical rela- 
tions — intuitive and discursive judgments. Hence it would 
obtain the conceptions of cause and substance as it would 
those of likeness and difference. The philosophy begins in 
the sense, as all knowledge must ; but it also ends in the 
sense, as no true philosophy can be permitted to do. In- 
stead of any intelligible dynamic connections, we have 
really only juxtapositions and sequences. All understand- 
ing-cognitions are forced to be, in some way, the determina- 
tions of sense. 

From this philosophy diverse theories have arisen in ref- 
erence to various topics of speculative interest, such as are 
designed to explain the manner of perception ; the founda- 
tion of moral obligation and responsibility ; and the capa- 
bility of attaining the data for a natural theology ; but wo 
have occasion now to consider such only as relate to a uni- 
versal nature of things. A few of the more prominent 
cases will be sufficient to expose the illusion which comes in 
on this side, and show the deceptive ambiguity in the point 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF NATURE EXPOSED. 313 

of degrading the notional to a mere phenomenal, as connec- 
tive for a universal physical system. 

(] .) The first to be here noticed is the theory of David 
Hume. Whether the philosophy of Locke induced the 
skepticism of Hume, or whether the skepticism was itself 
congenial and the philosophy adopted as the means of justi- 
fying it, is not incumbent upon us here to decide. This 
much is clear, that he most acutely detected the skeptical 
tendencies of this philosophy, and as legitimately as intrep- 
idly pushed the issue to the entire subversion of all philoso- 
phy in physics and of all science in theology. Nature and 
Religion have no other foundations than such as must be 
laid in faith, and which in each case may easily be convicted 
of credulity ; and therefore to the consistent philosopher 
there is nothing so natural, so logically consequential, and 
thus nothing so noble, as to avow his doubts of them both. 

The process in Hume's philosophizing is very plain and 
direct from the premises given. Knowledge, as given direct 
through the perceptions of sense, is experience ; and all such 
sensible objects are termed " Impressions." The recalling 
of such impressions by the memory, or the anticipation of 
them in the imagination, he terms " Ideas." The ideas are 
the copies of the impressions, but as secondary they must 
be more faint and indistinct than the primary perceptions. 
We can have " impressions " of only that which is given in 
experience ; and no " ideas " in the memory or the imagina- 
tion which must not also be the copies of experience. 
These "impressions" and "ideas" are the mind's entire 
stock of original elements for all knowledge ; and by the 
functions of combination, comparison, and abstraction, these 
elements may be brought into various propositions and 

14 



314 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

judgments; and such modifications of them must consti 
tute the sum total of all that man can know. 

And now, " the relations of ideas," as given in the com- 
parisons and combinations of the mind, are demonstratively- 
certain ; inasmuch as they are intuitive, or immediately be- 
held ; and in this field lie all the conclusions of mathematics. 
Here is exact science. But " matters of fact " can not be made 
to stand together in any such relations, and can not therefore 
be brought within the demonstrations of science. How 
clearly, in all this, did Hume see that no intuitive process 
could legitimate a discursive judgment ! That any present 
fact in our experience should be connected with another 
fact which is to follow it, can not be made intuition ; and 
yet, by calling the last an effect of the first as its cause, we 
assume that there is a necessary connection, and then carry 
our convictions quite out of experience, and assume to de- 
termine how other facts and events must be, which have not 
at all been matters of experience, and perhaps are not yet at 
all in being. By what legitimate principles are such con- 
nections in judgments effected ? All a priori demonstra- 
tion, that such a connection must be in order that experi- 
ence should be determined in the space and time-relations, 
was unknown to Hume, and utterly impossible to be effected 
by any philosophy based upon experience; and thus his 
scepticism in physical science stood impregnable. The ef- 
fect can not be immediately seen in the cause ; no possible 
construction can give an intuition from one to the other ; 
and thus there can not be any predetermination of what the 
consequent shall be from any thing given in the antecedent. 
All reasoning from effect to cause, or from cause to effect, is 
thus wholly an assumption. All that can be said for it, and 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF NATURE EXPOSED. 315 

the clearest explanation of any conviction attained through 
it, is simply resolved into the result which a repetition of 
experience induces in the mind. 

The philosophical explanation of the process is this ; a 
first experience of such connection was like all other experi- 
ence, an " impression" as a primary fact of sequence with- 
out any conception of necessity in the order of Connection. 
Frequent repetition of the same sequence as " impression," 
induces its copy as " idea" in the memory, and this also is 
put as copy in the anticipations of the imagination ; and this 
copy as idea, faint at first, ultimately becomes strong and 
confident "belief" that such connections are necessary. 
The conception of cause is an " idea," as it is a copy of an 
" impression," and is thus a mere offspring of experience as 
truly as any other copy in the memory or the imagination. 
The experience has given the idea of cause ; cause has not 
determined the order of experience ; and hence all reasoning 
from causes, as any a priori conditioning of nature, must be 
mere sophistry. Both Natural Philosophy, and Natural 
Theology are at once convicted of building a structure with- 
out a basis. 

And here we may detect the fallacy of the philosophy in 
its very source, and dispel the delusion which has given so 
much speciousness to this skepticism, by applying our a 
priori idea of an understanding as function for connecting 
phenomena in a system of universal nature. And this fal- 
lacy will at once, in this light, be seen to lie in the ambi- 
guity of using the same cognition as both in the sense and in 
the understanding. Here the understanding-cognition is 
sensualized into the phenomenal, whereas in the former 
order of philosophizing, the sense-conception was intellec- 



316 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

tualized into the notional. The "impression" is wholly of 
the sense, and is thus phenomenon only. The sequences of 
events are phenomenal sequences altogether, and they ac- 
count for our convictions of necessary connection simply 
through their repetition in experience. But no account is 
attempted for any necessary order in the events of nature 
itself. The connectives for phenomena into a cognition of a 
universal nature of things are themselves mere copies of 
the phenomenal. Cause and effect in their own necessary 
connections do not condition our experience, but the repeti- 
tions of our experience condition all our " ideas" of causa- 
tion. The same also must have been true of the connectives 
of substance, and of reciprocal influence, as of cause ; only 
that the skepticism did not philosophize broad enough to 
encounter the necessity for their explanation. The notion 
in the understanding is degraded to a mere copy of the phe- 
nomenal in the sense, and gives to philosophy a nature of 
things which only seem to be connected in universal order 
and system, because the phenomena as original "impres- 
sions" have in the sense had their juxtapositions and 
sequences. Nature is merely a mass of appearances, and 
not a connection of existences : a continuance of " impres- 
sions," and not a series of things. And without a true 
notional in the understanding, as a priori demonstrated from 
the conditions of determining an experience in the space 
and time-relations, this is all to which philosophy could 
attain. Science could not go beyond sense. Mathematics 
only could be exact ; philosophy and theology must be opin- 
ion and faith. All judgments of a nature of things must 
rest upon mere phantasms as the copies of those " impres- 
sions" which we deem them to connect ; and all the conclu- 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF NATURE EXPOSED. 317 

sions of natural philosophy and theology rest solely upon 
the credulity which our habitual experience has induced. 
The supercilious sneer of the skeptic springs spontaneously 
from his clear perception that both philosophy and religion 
have no foundation. 

(2.) Another example of this delusive method of discur- 
sive thinking is given in the philosophy of Brown. The 
understanding-cognition is degraded to a mere illusion of the 
sense, and then rejected as an empty figment. The order 
of nature in the connected series of cause and effect is 
reduced to a mere fact of invariable sequence, which the 
human mind is so made as unavoidably to anticipate. 

This entire theory of causation is expressed in the fol- 
lowing statement. According to Brown, simple invariable 
succession is the entire conception of cause and effect. The 
conception of povier, as some bond which connects the ante- 
cedent and the consequent, is affirmed by him to be an illu- 
sive phantom of the imagination ; and though common to 
all former philosophers with the vulgar, is yet a mere chimera. 
That an illusion of some third thing, called power, stands 
between the two sequences and connects them, he explains 
as having become a general admission from various sources. 
The structure of language ; a false identity between a thing 
with and without a particular predicate, as if the sun shin- 
ing and the sun, or the man thinking and the man, were 
respectively the same ; and the imperfection of the sense 
which is perpetually finding higher antecedents ; all these 
are made to explain the fact that the delusive conception of 
power has become so common. But when the mind is disa- 
bused of this delusion, then the whole process of cause and 
effect ceases to be so mysterious and inexplicable. There is 



318 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

no such mysterious something ever present in all sequences 
and never appearing, which has been called power, for con- 
necting them together. 

Such an illusion of an intervening connective does not 
help to explain our conception of cause and effect, but in 
truth gives another antecedent altogether more inexplicable 
than the phenomenon itself. Expel such a delusion, and 
then there remains simple invariable sequence. The whole 
real meaning of power is, therefore, this invariableness of 
succession. To say that a certain degree of heat applied to 
a metal will have its invariable consequent of liquefaction ; 
or to say that a certain volition is invariably followed by 
muscular motion, is in each case the same as to say that the 
first has power to produce the last, and which again is the 
same as to say the first is the cause of the last. Invariable- 
ness of sequence is the whole conception of power and of 
causation. Having thus taken away all intrinsic dynamical 
connection, the natural inquiry for the origin of this univer- 
sal conviction of invariable succession is met by cutting, 
without any attempt at untying, the knot, and resolving the 
whole into an arbitrary constitution of the human mind. 
We are so made as necessarily to imbibe such a conviction. 
It is an instinct implanted in human nature, operating as an 
" internal revelation," and is " a voice of ceaseless and uner- 
ring prophecy." 

Locke had attempted to account for the genesis of such 
a conception as power, and thus for causation, from sensi- 
ble experience. But Brown, more clearly than Locke, saw 
the impossibility of attaining any proper conception of 
power as phenomenon in sense. Obedient to the philoso- 
phy, therefore, since the conception of power can not come 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF NATURE EXPOSED. 319 

from it, it is taken as wholly a delusion, and its reality dis- 
carded altogether. If it were at all possible to be used, he 
knows of no other method than by interposing it as another 
phenomenal antecedent to the effect, and thus merely per- 
plexing the matter without at all explaining it. It is made 
the mere shadow which coming events cast before them, and 
the mind from its conformation anticipates the consequent 
as wholly an unexplained prediction. The notional, as un- 
derstanding-cognition, is wholly abolished in the mere sense- 
cognition of an invariable sequence, and the conviction of 
such invariable order is an instinctive prophesying. 

But how impossible thus to attain to an intellectual sys- 
tem of universal nature ! The separate phenomena are as 
really independent of all inter-agency as the particles of dust 
floating in the sunlight, and simply have such an invariable 
order, but nothing which efficiently produces it. Nature is 
a mere congeries of phenomena, and as destitute of all con- 
nection and reciprocal communion as the letters of the 
alphabet. 

(3.) There are two other modifications of this method 
of philosophizing, having an immediate reference to mental 
phenomena, and out of which have originated two theories 
for giving to the mind systematic unity ; and which are of 
the more interest for American psychologists, since their 
respective authors were divines of great distinction and 
high reputation in the religious community of New England 
while they lived, and their influence upon all metaphysical 
speculation will not cease with the generation that now suc- 
ceeds them. We need have no reference to any theological 
doctrines to which these theories may have been applied, 
either for explanation, defense, or refutation ; nor to any 



320 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

other religious or philosophical tenets of their authors, but 
solely to the methods in which mental phenomena are sought 
to be connected into a system in the Understanding. 

The first to which we will here attend, though later in 
age, is the theory of the late Dr. Emmons, so venerable while 
living, and so much revered since his death. This theory 
has been familiarly called " the exercise scheme ;" and when 
referred to the true idea of an understanding as above 
attained, will be found to follow that order of philosophizing 
which we are now considering — making the phenomenal to 
be the essential being, and wholly dispensing with the 
notional, or introducing an arbitrary and illusory figment. 

The outline of this theory is as follows : — The specific 
acts of thinking, feeling, loving, willing, etc., come within 
consciousness, and each one for the period of its duration is 
the soul in its essential being. There is no true substance 
which, as constant substratum or perpetual source, perma- 
nently exists, and that changes in its mode of being so as to 
occasion the altered events ; but when the thinking is, that 
is the soul ; and when that departs and a feeling or a willing 
is, the exercise is all there is of the being, and the soul 
exists as one and simple in every act. The voluntary exer- 
cises make the moral man, and all such acts in distinction 
from intellectual acts are known as the heart. " The heart 
consists in voluntary exercises, and voluntary exercises are 
moral agency." " There is no morally corrupt nature, dis- 
tinct from free voluntary sinful exercises." The phenom- 
enal is the sole being of mind, and nothing is but that which 
is the exercise itself. 

And here, with all existence wholly in the exercise and 
utterly exclusive of any substance which may be thought as 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF NATURE EXPOSED. 321 

perpetual source for the exercises, the inquiry must arise — 
Whence are these exercises ? Is there a void of all being 
between them, and thus does each, as essential existence, 
come up from a vacuity of all existence ? This would seem 
to be the necessary conclusion, since no substantial being is, 
which may perdure through all the exercises. To escape 
from such a chasm of all being and an origination of the 
phenomenal being of the exercise utterly from a void, as 
must follow when the notional is discarded and an under- 
standing is vacated, the supernatural is immediately inter- 
posed, and the exercise comes up as a direct production of 
the Deity. " Since all men are dependent agents, all their 
motions, exercises, or actions must originate from a Divine 
efficiency. We can no more act than we can exist without 
the constant aid and influence of the Deity." The super- 
natural is thus made to take the place of the notional, and 
all the phenomena immediately originate in God, and are 
connected in unity by the direct efficiency of God. The 
human agency is the exercise itself, and the Divine agency 
is the efficient producer of it ; and thus it is affirmed that 
" human agency is always inseparably connected with Divine 
agency." " He not only prepared persons to act, but made 
them act." " There is no possible way in which He could 
dispose them to act right or wrong but only by producing 
right or wrong volitions in their hearts. And if He pro- 
duced their bad as well as good volitions, then His agency 
was concerned in precisely the same manner in their wrong 
as in their right actions." " His agency in making them act 
necessarily connects His agency and theirs together." The 
Divine efficiency is thus made to subserve all the purposes 
of the notional in an understanding, and the phenomenal 

14* 



322 THE UNDEKSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

exercises come up from it, and adhere together in a series 
by it. 

But the delusiveness of such a false connection in the 
understanding is at once exposed, when we step forward 
upon it and trust our philosophy to it. For all that we pos- 
sibly know is the phenomenal only, and all our conceptions 
must conform to the phenomenal, and although we have 
used the efficiency of the Deity as the origin and connective 
of all human exercises, yet must we now degrade this super- 
natural, used as a notional, at once to the phenomenal only. 
How may we conceive of the Divine agency in any other 
manner than as phenomenal exercise ? Divine efficiency in 
producing our exercises is but an exercise, single and simple 
in being as our own. This, in other connections of the 
theory, is fully admitted and even directly argued, though 
when fully apprehended in its bearings upon the philosophy 
it shows its whole basis to be a mere delusion. The Divine 
efficiency is wholly ambiguous ; it has been used as a no- 
tional, but when we come to rest upon it, the fact that after 
all it is only the phenomenal betrays itself. God exists just 
as we exist, in exercises only. " There is no more difficulty 
in forming clear and just conceptions of God's power, wis- 
dom, goodness, and agency, than in forming clear and just 
conceptions of human power, wisdom, goodness, and agency. 
Power in God is of the same nature as power in man. Wis- 
dom in God is of the same nature as wisdom in man. Good- 
ness in God is of the same nature as goodness in man. And 
free voluntary moral agency in God is of the same nature as 
free voluntary moral agency in man. To say that God's 
agency is different in nature from our own is as absurd as to 
say that His knowledge, His power, or His moral rectitude is 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF NATURE EXPOSED. 323 

different from our own. And to say this is to say that we 
have not, and can not have, any true knowledge of God." 
God's agency is as our own agency, with His whole exist- 
ence in the single exercise for the period of its duration ; 
phenomenal and fleeting from exercise to exercise ; so that we 
are just as far from all originating source and connecting 
efficiency of the exercises as before. We have deluded our- 
selves by the use of a divine efficiency, as if it were a legiti- 
mate notion as source and connecting cause for our human 
exercises ; but when we now come to rest upon it, we find 
it to be mere appearance and not being ; a sense-cognition 
of the phenomenal and not at all an understanding-cognition 
of the notional ; and the reeling philosophy must at once 
fall, or betake itself to some other and farther advanced 
delusion of using the sense for the understanding. Such a 
philosophy can not possibly attain to a conception of the 
efficiency it so much uses. It calls it Divine efficiency — 
Deity; but it is used only as an originating source and con- 
necting cause for human phenomenal acts. If it were validly 
attained it would be mere physical connective for the exer- 
cises ; but as ultimately apprehended, it means only a higher 
exercise single and isolated, and equally as devoid of all pos- 
sible conception of efficiency as the human exercise. There 
is no connective for mental action, either as human or Divine ; 
and the very notion of efficiency, to say nothing of a free 
personality and independent Deity, is a surreptitious taking 
of a passing phenomenon in its place. Such exercises could 
no more be determined as an experience in time, than the 
exercises of our dreams can be connected in the unity of 
existence with our waking hours. 

The other theory belonging to the same process in philos- 



324 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

ophizing, and the last which we shall here feel disposed to 
notice particularly, is that which is advanced by Pres. 
Edwards, in answer to an objection against the doctrine of 
Original Sin. His acceptation of the doctrine of original 
sin, in systematic theology, is that of an imputation of 
Adam's first transgression to all his posterity in this sense, 
that iii all there is a " liableness or exposedness, in the divine 
judgment, to partake of the punishment of that sin." The 
objection which he conceives as being brought against such 
a doctrine is, " that such imputation is unjust and unreason- 
able, inasmuch as Adam and his posterity are not one and 
the same." The objection is removed by affirming just the 
opposite, viz., that Adam and his posterity are one and the 
same ; and then comes in the philosophical theory to which 
we here have reference, to show the identity of the race 
.with the progenitor in the first transgression. With such 
identity understood, the punishment is apprehended as both 
just and reasonable, inasmuch as their action is involved as 
truly as his act. But without any concern here with the 
theological doctrine, we look only at the philosophical theory 
to account for the personal identity of all with Adam. 

There is first a somewhat extensive reference to different 
analogies in the perpetuation of identity in other cases ; as 
of a tree a hundred years old, and that tree as it first 
sprang from the ground ; the adult body of forty years, 
with the body in its infancy ; the identity in one person of 
the body and the soul ; and perpetuated consciousness as 
throughout the same consciousness; after which comes a 
more explicit announcement of the theory. It is made to 
have a general application to the phenomena of both the 
material and the mental world. These phenomena are ever 



FALSE SYSTEMS OP NATURE EXPOSED. 325 

separate and fleeting, and the difficulty is, as thus isolate, to 
account for their identity in any one thing. Thus we have 
the brightness of the moon shining in the clear evening sky, 
and that shining appears constant and in perpetual being. 
But when this is intellectually considered, it is manifest that 
nothing here is permanent ; but that all is only a repetition 
of coming and departing appearance. The rays in one in- 
stant of the shining are not those of the next instant. A 
new effect comes into being with each successive moment of 
the shining, and this coming and departing of one new 
effect after another is the same in all its qualities ; in the 
gravity of the moon as in that of its shining ; and this also 
in the case of all the phenomena of an outer world. All 
nature is but a continual repetition of new creations. Noth- 
ing is for a moment the same, but its perpetuation is a con- 
tinual repetition of new products. That there is any per- 
petuity to any thing depends wholly upon perpetual crea- 
tions, and identity of object in any thing is an arbitrary 
establishment of the Deity. . A divine constitution is given 
to nature in these incessant and orderly new creations. The 
sameness or identity of any thing, from time to time, con- 
sists solely in the keeping of an onward flow of these new 
products. Nothing is the same in nature from one period 
to another, but just as the flowing river is the same ; a con- 
tinual coming and departing of the new elements of which 
the thing is constituted. 

By the like arbitrary establishment of the Deity through 
a perpetual Divine efficiency, the personal identity of every 
human being is constituted. One mental phenomenon de- 
parts and another comes, just as the efficiency of God keeps 
on the perpetual series ; and inasmuch as this is the sole 



326 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

ground of all personal identity, nothing hinders that this 
perpetuated divine constitution should run on from one per- 
son to another, and up through all persons to their first pa- 
rent. No man would be the same from hour to hour, and 
on from year to year, except for this divine constitution ; 
and this may just as well give identity from age to age as 
from year to year, and to all individuals of the race as to all 
the phenomena in each individual. This is what gives to 
the human race its unity, and humanity is thus constituted 
one identity through all ages. The first transgression is 
therefore an act belonging to all, and, as sinful, throws its 
guilt and liability to punishment upon all ; inasmuch as in 
this divine constitution an identity is perpetuated, making 
all to be truly one. 

How clearly is all this method of philosophizing based 
upon the principle of bringing in the conception of a super- 
natural to perform the part of a notional in the connections 
of the understanding. Phenomena are taken as the true 
being, and a divine efficiency connects them ; and this not 
only in nature but in personality ; and not only in one per- 
son but identifying all persons. How shall such an effi- 
ciency be attained except as a mere assumption ? How shall 
its own connections in any identity be determined ? How 
shall phenomena be determined in the experience as in one 
space and in one time, without shutting up this connecting 
divine efficiency also within the determinations of space and 
time ? The Deity must in this way be degraded to the 
phenomenal. And in the same manner may we detect the 
fallacies of all philosophizing, where the phenomenal is 
forced into the place of the only true being, and the no- 
tional is discarded ; or the supernatural is made to take its 



FALSE SYSTEMS OF NAT U BE EXPOSED. 327 

place, only in the very next step to be forced in subjection 
to the constructions of the sense. The phenomenal can 
never be connected into a system of nature and determined 
in an experience in space and time, by any false playing off 
of the conjunctions of the sense for the connections of the 
understanding ; nor by surreptitiously introducing a Divine 
efficiency, which can itself have no other predicates than the 
a priori elements of quantity. 

We may, then, affirm the partiality, incompleteness, and 
thus the error of all philosophy which deludes itself by an 
ambiguity, on either side, of elevating the sense into the 
region of the understanding or of degrading the under- 
standing to the functions of the sense. An amphiboly nec- 
essarily follows, and the ball is tossed from one hand into 
the other, as every changing step- destroys the balance thus 
vainly sought to be preserved. Certainly, with very few 
exceptions, philosophy from its earliest history has kept it- 
self one-sided on one or the other of these extremes ; and 
to help itself out of its difficulties, either nature has been 
made God or God has been made nature. The English 
mind has best maintained its balance, since the great lights 
of Grecian philosophy in Plato and Aristotle have been ob- 
scured or perverted, and this not so much from the clear and 
intelligent apprehension of the manner of doing it, as by an 
almost instinctive mother-wit or good judgment, sometimes 
called common-sense, which forbad the putting of all things 
upon either foot at once ; and feeling the awkwardness of 
all such attempts, it has striven at least to make its philos- 
ophy stand on both feet. Cudworth has introduced his con- 
ception of " a plastic power " into nature ; and this, though 
neither a space-filling substance nor a time-filling source^ 



328 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS IDEA. 

neither successive cause nor simultaneous reciprocity ; yet, 
as a connective notional in an understanding, merely general 
and which might be made to accomplish what any occasion 
for its use should require, has preserved his intellectual sys- 
tem of the universe from falling into the gulf on either side, 
through an annihilation of the sense, or an emptiness of the 
understanding. It gave a real dynamical connection to the 
phenomenal universe, though with no possible determinate 
order a priori / and his whole atomic contrivance is just so 
much surplusage, inasmuch as all notional connective is sup- 
plied in the "plastic poioer" and the atoms become the 
mere "chips in the porridge," the philosophy being wholly 
made up without them. 

So, also, Newton's good judgment, cleaving to facts 
rather than speculation, and taking these in their intellectual 
laws rather than merely observed appearances, kept both 
the constructions of the sense and the connections of the 
understanding in their proper spheres, and performing their 
proper services in the cognition of universal nature ; but 
without any apprehension of an a priori psychology, which 
gave to each their necessary and universal conditions. The 
notions of substance, cause, and reciprocal influence, were un- 
derstood to be the laws in nature, while the diagrams in pure 
space and time gave the intuitive forms for all phenomena ; 
and thus was a nature of things truly constituted, with no 
ambiguity of either the functions of the sense or those of 
the understanding. And so more emphatically with the 
philosophical genius of Lord Bacon ; accurately distinguish- 
ing the laws and forms in nature, from all qualities and events 
in appearance ; and thus perfectly separating the work of 
the sense, from all operations of the understanding ; analyz- 



FALSE SYSTEMS OP NATURE EXPOSED. 329 

ing nature intellectually and not chemically; it has estab- 
lished forever the highway of all inductive science, though 
all unconscious of an d priori road which, in its misappre- 
hension, it affected to despise as emptiness and absurdity. 
The idealism it condemns is that which its own good judg- 
ment taught itself to shun — a mere arbitrary hypothesis ; 
not that which has its ideals in the conditional laws of all 
thought, and which must necessarily be in nature, if nature 
herself may be subjected to a determined experience in 
space and time. 

We here complete the First Chapter of the Understand- 
ing, having attained it completely in its Idea, and also seen 
how, in the light of this idea, we may detect the errors of 
false and defective processes of philosophizing, in those 
very points where the fallacies originate ; because they are 
seen to depart from the primitive elements of all possible 
connection, and to violate the conditional principles of all 
thinking in discursive judgments, and thereby render them- 
selves helpless in all determination of an experience in space 
and time. But, as yet our attainment is only an Idea. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS OBJECTIVE LAW. 



SECTION I. 

SPACE AND TIME, EACH AS A WHOLE. 

The Function of an Understanding is to so give connec- 
tion to the phenomena gained in the sense, that they may 
become an order of experience determined to their places in 
space and to their periods in time. Our a priori idea of 
such function that may operate such a result, has been found 
to include the notion of constant substance as ground for con- 
nection in space ; perduring substance as source for connec- 
tion in perpetual time, consecutive cause as efficiency for con- 
necting in successive time, and reciprocal cause as condition 
for connecting in simultaneous time. This is subjective 
Idea, or possible understanding only ; for demonstrative 
science it is still incumbent that we attain a Law in actual 
facts, the correlative of this idea, and in such determine the 
real operation of such a faculty. 

In effecting this, we shall take our attained a priori idea 
for the present as hypothesis only, and will apply it to actual 
facts in a sufficiently broad induction to induce full conviction 
that our necessary and universal idea has its counterpart in 
a veritable law of intelligent action. We shall need to 



ONE SPACE AND ONE TIME. 331 

gather facts in respect both to the determination of an 
experience in one whole of space and of time, and the 
determination of it to particular places and periods in this 
one whole of space and of time. It will be requisite to 
appropriate a section to each. 

That we in fact do determine experience in both ways, is 
manifest from our forms of expression and the universal adap- 
tations of language. We speak of a universal Space as inclu- 
sive of all spaces, and in which all experience is in the same one 
space. So, also, we speak of a universal Time inclusive of 
all times, comprising eternitas a parte ante and eternitas a 
parte post, and in which all experience of ourselves or others 
is embraced. We speak of space as one void expanse, which 
in its immensity gives place for all phenomena ; and of time 
as one open duration, in which is period for all events. We 
talk of the unfolding and unrolling of time ; that which 
has been as already spread out, that which now is as just 
opening, and that which is to come as yet shut up : and so 
also of the stream of time, all the parts of which pass any 
one point successively ; and of the ocean of time, which, as 
one all-embracing flood, bears all events along together. 
Space is thus a whole enclosing all spaces, and not an ever- 
growing conjunction of parts; and time is one whole em- 
bracing all periods, and not an endless adjunct of portions 
of time. We speak, moreover, of experience determined in 
its particular places, as of the map of human experience in 
which all phenomena have their place ; and also determined 
in its particular periods, as of the chronicle of human experi- 
ence in which all events have their own order of occurrence. 

With the fact manifest in all forms of communication 
that we determine experience both in a whole of space and 



332 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS LAW. 

of time, and each fact of experience to a. particular place 
and period in this whole of space and of time ; we have 
this as the end of our present investigation, to answer the 
inquiry — How is this effected ? Do the facts in the case 
show that such determination is made under a Law, which 
completely corresponds with our a priori Idea ? This we 
must make to be apparent, both as determination in one 
whole of space and of time ; and as particular in place and 
period. 



SECTION II. 

THE DETERMINATION OF EXPERIENCE IN ONE WHOLE OP 
SPACE AND OF TIME. 

We will here make an induction of facts, which will be 
seen to come under the conditions of our hypothetical idea, 
viz., that we determine an experience to be in one universal 
space and time, through the connections of the phenomenal 
in a notional. We will take an experience in space and an 
experience in time separately, inasmuch as the facts in each 
case must be of a different class and indicating a peculiar 
notional connective for each ; that of experience in universal 
space, conditioned upon the connection of space-filling sub- 
stance, and that of experience in universal time, conditioned 
upon the connection of time-enduring source. The substance 
is known as space-filling, by the apprehending of a constant 
impenetrability in the same place ; and as time-enduring, 
from the perduring of this impenetrability through its differ- 
ent places, or its altered phenomena in the same place. 



EXPERIENCE IN ONE SPACE AND TIME. 333 

1. Experience in Universal Space. — Let us first take the 
facts given in our pure intuitive reasoning. It would be the 
same in numbers as m the pure diagrams of points in space ; 
but the illustration will not be so perspicuous from the use 
of numbers, as from that of definite pure figures in space. 
When I construct any diagram by my sole intellectual 
agency in self-consciousness, I have in the apprehension of 
the pure diagram necessarily the apprehension of a place 
also. Every repetition of the constructing of similar pure 
diagrams is necessarily connected with the apprehension of 
a place for each completed construction. Our facts, there- 
fore, may here be multiplied to the extent that we can have 
different constructions of pure diagrams, all giving an appre- 
hension of a space in the fact of their own pure apprehen- 
sion. 

But none of these pure spaces are determined as in one 
universal space. One construction is produced and dis- 
missed after another and at different periods intervening, 
and as the pure diagram departs from the self-consciousness, 
the place apprehended also departs with it ; inasmuch as 
neither the diagram nor the place had any significancy 
except in my subjective consciousness. We can by no 
means determine that these places are in one universal space, 
and only determine from the primitive unity of our self- 
consciousness, that they have been constructed and appre- 
hended by one self. There is no constant substance, as 
space-filling, whereby to determine constant sameness of 
place, and we do not, therefore, determine different con- 
structed pure diagrams in their places to be in one and the 
same universal space. 

Much less is it practicable to determine the pure dia- 



334 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS LAW. 

grams constructed in different self-conscious subjects and 
their apprehended spaces to be in one universal space. The 
constructing agency is conditioned only by the scheme in 
the productive imagination in each subject ; and we do not 
determine one man's pure diagrams in space, to be in the 
same universal space with the places of another man's dia- 
grams. We can not say that the triangles, circles, etc., of 
one, are the same as those of another ; nor that they are 
together in the same one whole of all space ; inasmuch as 
there is no one space-filling substance, which occasions the 
constructions in all persons to be of one thing, and in one 
and the same place, and this in the one universal space. The 
law for construction is here found, but the law for connec- 
tion is utterly wanting ; and hence, while we have the intui- 
tion, we can have no judgment in the understanding, and 
while we have a subjective experience, as seeming phenom- 
ena, we can have no connection of these seeming phenom- 
ena into an experience determined in one universal space. 

We will next take facts in mere organic affections. — The 
organ of vision is the most appropriate, though sometimes 
facts of the same class may be found in the organ of touch, 
or that of sound. It is practicable, by a pressure on the 
eye-ball, to attain changeable floating colors in our selt- 
consciousness, and which keep up their appearance for a 
longer or shorter period. We may construct them into 
figures more or less definite, and though often unlike any 
shapes of reality, they yet have their places and relationships 
each to each. Some permanent organic defect or injury 
may make such affections permanent, as in cases of clouded 
spots and rings in the sight, and moving appearances as if 
of some discoloration in the humor of the lens, known as 



EXPEKIEXCE IX ONE SPACE AND TIME. 335 

volitantes muscipuli ; or perhaps, for a few moments after 
having turned the eye aside from an intense light ; or the 
dreadful phantoms of some brain affections, as in delirium, 
tremens. In all such phantasies, we have as truly the appre- 
hension of a place, as we have of the shades or colors which 
come and go as organic illusions ; but inasmuch as the affec- 
tion is simply organic, and having no significancy except for 
the self-conscious subject whose organ it is, such illusions 
and their places are as wholly subjective as the pure dia- 
grams of mathematics. They are not conditioned in their 
construction by any scheme in the productive imagination, 
but altogether from the affection in the internal state of the 
organ ; and as these change or are permanent from the state 
of the organ, and not from any occasion in a constant space- 
filling substance, so we never determine such places to be in 
one universal space, nor that the places at different periods 
of the appearance are the same places. And much less do 
we determine the places, in all the different self-conscious sub- 
jects of such affections, to be in the same universal space. 
The occasion for a construction in figure is given, because 
the conditional law of all conjunction in unity is here ; but 
the conditions for a connection in the judgment of an under- 
standing are not here given, and we can bring no such 
experience within the determination of a universal space. 
All such facts are fully explicable from our hypothetical idea, 
and prove it to be the law for the determination of experience 
in one space. 

We will again take facts occurring in reflected vision. 
The same illustrations might be found in reflected hearing 
as an echo in the sense ; but inasmuch as hearing has the 
conditions for only a very imperfect construction of space, 



336 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS LAW. 

it can not be made so convenient for our design. We have 
appearances in vision from any medium that may subserve 
the purposes of a mirror — the calm surface of a lake ; the 
prepared plate of glass, with its quicksilver coating on the 
backside ; or some metal with its highly polished surface. 
In any such arrangement, the occasion is given for a content 
in the sense, and the construction into definite figure is com- 
plete, and readily effected. In all such constructions, a 
space is apprehended as necessarily as the figure constructed 
in the consciousness. But this space is significant only as 
relative to the particular mirror. The mirror is conditional 
for it ; it is produced in it, and destroyed in its destruction, 
There are as many different spaces as mirrors, and it is im- 
practicable that there should be one universal space em- 
bracing all mirrored spaces. Such appearance is objective, 
inasmuch as the mirror is no part of the subject-self but 
occasions the same appearance for all subjects of self-con- 
sciousness in the same circumstances ; and thus the space is 
objective and independent of the peculiarity of the subject 
apprehending it, and is the same space for all self-conscious 
subjects of it. But though objective and the same space to 
all that may apprehend it, yet is it space in that mirror only, 
and not the same space with that in any other mirror ; since 
the removal or destruction of the mirror abolishes its space, 
without any interference with other mirrored spaces. We 
may thus very well speak of the definite figures in the same 
mirror as all appearing within the same space, for there is 
the constant substance of the mirror through which to con- 
nect at each different period of observation and for every 
different observer. But another mirror has its own space, 
for each period of observation and for every observer ; and 



EXPERIENCE IN ONE SPACE AND TIME. 337 

it would demand an including mirror of all mirrors, to bring 
the spaces of all mirrors into one universal mirrored space. 
And precisely because there is no such all-embracing sub- 
stance, which, as universal mirror, might hold all mirrored 
spaces in itself, there can be no determined universal whole 
for the spaces in all mirrors. It is thus impossible to deter- 
mine the experience in reflective vision in one universal 
space ; and this precisely in conformity with our hypothesis ; 
for, so far as constant substance may be thought in the mir- 
ror itself, there is one whole of space, but because a con- 
stant substance underlying all mirrors can not be thought, 
therefore the spaces in all mirrors can not be connected in 
one universal space. 

And still further, the mirrored space may be considered! 
in reference to the space in which the mirror itself is. Each 
mirror is itself in a space and has its own space in itself, and 
the space within the mirror can not be the same space with 
that in which is the mirror itself; for the removal' or de- 
struction of the mirror is an abolishing of the space within 
it, but no interference with that space in which was the 
mirror itself. To make the mirrored si>aces one universal 
space would demand a universal substance as constant mir- 
ror, which might contain all others ; but such universal' mir- 
ror would still demand its own place in which it might he, 
and could never identify the place in which it was, with the- 
universal mirrored space that was in it. Were it true there- 
fore, that an experience of reflective vision should be deter- 
mined in a universal whole of all mirrored spaces, by the 
occasion of an including substance as mirror for all mirrors, 
it would still be impracticable to determine such experience 
in one universal space ; for the spaces in which the universal 

15 



338 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS LAW. 

mirror must be, could not be thought connected in one space 
with that universal mirrored space which was in the mirror 
itself. 

And still further, the space in which the mirrored ap- 
pearance is, may be considered in reference to the space in 
which the phenomenon is, of which the mirrored appear- 
ance is the reflection. The reflected appearance is not the 
same as the phenomenon reflected, for the removal of the 
mirror abolishes the first, but has no interference with the 
last ; and in the same way and for the same reason, the space 
in which is the reflected appearance is not the same space as 
that hi which is the phenomenon reflected. Should some 
universal mirror, therefore, give all reflected appearance to 
be an experience in one universal mirrored space, we should 
not thus connect this experience in the same space with an 
experience of the phenomena reflected. The one, though 
universal of its kind, would still leave the other altogether 
unincluded. The substance which filled the sjmce and oc- 
casioned the phenomenon reflected would be no substance 
in the mirrored space of the reflected appearance, and on 
this aecount the two spaces can not be connected in a judg- 
ment of the understanding, into the same space. Thus, in 
all the many and very diversified facts of reflected vision, 
we find them all held in colligation by our hypothetical idea, 
as their actual law. 

We will, in the last place, take the facts which occur in 
open vision. The illustration will be the same in any organ- 
ism, that may give occasion for definite construction in 
space ; but as the organ of vision gives such occasion the 
most perfectly, the facts connected with vision become the 
most appropriate for our purpose. Mere aj:>pearance in con- 



EXPERIENCE IX ONE SPACE AND TIME. 339 

sciousness necessitates the apprehending of a space ; but mere 
appearance does not give an occasion for determining all as 
in one space. When I simply perceive the stars in their 
appearances, I see them to be in a space ; and I may make 
constructions, that shall give me their bearing aild distance 
from each other in that space ; but something more than 
appearance must be given, as occasion for connecting them 
in thought in the one universal space. I can not perceive in 
the sense, but only judge in the understanding that all ap- 
pearance is in the one space. If I sail on a smooth lake in 
a clear night, I may perhaps be wholly unable to perceive 
the surface of the water, so perfectly does it reflect all that 
is above it. In such a case I shall perceive the appearance 
of the stars above and beneath, and so far as perception 
is concerned I am ensphered in a heaven of stars, and the 
mere appearance can not determine for me which hemi- 
sphere is direct and which reflected appearance. It is only 
where in the understanding I fix the constant space- 
filling substance, that I come to determine this one to be the 
existing heaven and the other its perfectly mirrored reflec- 
tion. And my determination of appearances in this one 
space is only as I think it to be filled with constant sub- 
stance. The space-filling substance of the stars has been 
constant through the day, though the more intense sunlight 
has wholly absorbed their phenomenal being ; and when 
they appear again on the succeeding evening, because their 
appearance is occasioned by the same constant substance, I 
judge them to be the same stars, and in the same space. 
So, also, when the voyager has sailed to the opposite side of 
the globe and on the opposite side of the equator, he per- 
ceives a heaven in which the stars have wholly another ap- 



340 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS LAW. 

pearance ; but he judges them all to be in the same one 
space, not because he so perceives them, but because he con- 
ceives a filling of space by some existing substance from the 
place of the stars in one hemisphere to the place of the dif- 
ferent stars in the other. A chasm of all substantial being 
as notional space-filling force would cut off all communica- 
tion from one phenomenal world to the other, and we should 
be unable to determine them in the same one space, but only 
as each in its own space. 

All the facts, both as negative of a connection in a no- 
tional and as positive for such connection, come together in 
our hypothesis — that we never determine experience in one 
universal space except in the thought of a connective no- 
tional, and always when we have such connection. No fact 
can be found in any experience determined in one whole of 
space, that may exclude itself from the colligation of this 
universal Law. 

2. Experience in Universal Time. — I can have no ap- 
prehension of the passing of a time except through some 
modification of my internal state. When that varied modi- 
fication is going on, a time is apprehended as going on in 
my consciousness ; as that is quickened or retarded in its 
flow, the apprehension of an elapsing time is faster or 
slower ; and as all such modification of inner state ceases in 
consciousness, all apprehension of a time ceases in conscious- 
ness likewise. It is, thus, ever the fact that some modify- 
ing process is going on in the internal state, and this appre- 
hended in the light of consciousness, or we do not con- 
sciously apprehend that a time is passing ; and that we do 
apprehend the elapsing of a time, in conformity with the 
flow of such varied modifications of inner sense. This fact 



EXPERIENCE IN ONE SPACE AND TIME. 341 

full in our apprehension will facilitate the acquisition, and 
ready application, of many other facts to Our present pur- 
pose. 

We vtiW first gather some facts in purely subjective expe- 
rience. There are many instances of an experience going on 
wholly within our own minds, and in which we are our- 
selves our own world. The inner sense alone is active in 
perceiving and constructing a train of passing events as they 
take place wholly w T ithin our own subjective being. This 
may be a passing of one emotion after another, or one 
thought after another, or perhaps a varied flow of thoughts, 
emotions, and purposes which stand only in our conscious- 
ness and pass only in our inner sense, wmile all attention to 
any thing external is withdrawn. In such a case there is 
the consciousness of an elapsing time, but as it has been ap- 
prehended only in relation to the coming and departing of 
the inner events, its correspondence with the time which has 
been going on in the flow of passing^ events external to us 
has not been at all regarded ; and as we have had no appre- 
hension of the external events and the time of their flow, it 
is impossible that we should put one within the other 
and determine them to the same one universal time. 
We are obliged, when we are roused from our subjective 
thinking, to recur to some standard which indicates how the 
flow of passing outward events has progressed, and thus 
determine the period of our musing by putting it within a 
definite period of an objective flowing of events ; and we 
are sometimes greatly surprised at the ascertained disparit}' 
between them. 

We may suppose some pure geometrician as Euclid or 
Archimedes, or some Newton or La Place constructing his 



342 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS LAW . 

pure diagrams of the heavenly movements, and so wholly 
intent on the intuitive processes which are going on in his 
own pure creations, that the phenomenal events of an outer 
world are utterly lost to the consciousness. To such a mind, 
absorbed in its own action, there will be a progressive modi- 
fication of the internal state as the process of pure construc- 
tion and intuition goes onward, and thus consciously a time 
is passing ; but the only time apprehended is that in which 
this inner agency may be brought, by constructing into 
definite periods the instants in which it has stood or the 
moments through which it has passed. Were there no 
other conception of the modification of an inner sense but 
such as was subjectively experienced in its own constructing 
agency, we should have a time but it would be our own 
subjective time only ; nor should we be able to say that it 
could be at all within any universal time of an objective 
duration. When the philosopher awoke from his profound 
study and went out from the consciousness of an inner sense 
to the consciousness of an outer movement, he would be 
wholly unable to identify the subjective succession with an 
objective duration, except as he could fix on some constant 
substantial being as a source of successive changes hi the 
alterations of its phenomena, and from that determine how 
an objective time had passed since his subjective time had 
been going on, and thus putting the period of the latter 
within the definite period of the former. 

While it thus is manifest that time subjectively can have 
no identification in an objective time ; except through the 
determination of the one within the other by the connec- 
tions of phenomenal events in a perduring substantial source, 
so it is the more manifest that the mere passing of a time 



EXPERIENCE IN ONE SPACE AND TIME. 343 

in subjective consciousness can never be determined in any 
universal time. My inner agency in its modifications of my 
internal state is subject to perpetual interruptions. When 
it is in process, then a time is passing ; when it is inter- 
rupted, then is the flow of time in my subjective conscious- 
ness broken up ; and it is not possible that I should conjoin 
the periods as in one time across these breaches. Within 
my subjective experience there has been only passing 
periods as I have been conscious of the varied internal 
modifications of state, and those separated by intervals 
when no subjective time was passing ; and surely, without 
some perduring source marking its changes in perpetually 
altered phenomena, and which I can never find in my sub- 
jective being, I can never connect these separate periods 
across their fathomless voids of all time, and determine them 
to belong to one universal whole of all time. To my sub- 
jective experience they are so many separate times. And I 
have nothing in me, as the subject of their self-conscious 
apprehension, by which I can connect them all in one 
universal time. 

Other subjects of self-consciousness may by their own 
inner agency be modifying their own internal states, and 
coming to the consciousness that a time is thus passing on 
in their inner sense ; but there is nothing to connect the 
periods in their interruptions into one time in each self-con- 
scious subject, much less any thing to connect all their 
periods into one universal time for them all. There must be 
a perduring source, whose changes shall be marked in con- 
tinually coming and departing phenomena which arise as 
events from it, and thus give a continually flowing time 
objectively as common standard for all their subjective 



344 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS LAW. 

times ; and only thus may all be determined in the same 
universal time. No one subject can connect his own periods 
across their frequent interruptions by any permanent standard 
in his own subjective being. And neither one nor all can 
bring the periods of their separate selves into one time, from 
any common standard found in their subjective being, nor is 
this in fact ever done but by referring them all to some per- 
manent objective source of changes. There would be as 
many times as there are subjects of self-consciousness, did 
we not determine our own and each others times by some 
permanent objective notional, which as substantial source 
connects the changes in their periods and gives one time for 
us all. 

We may next take facts in our subjective organism. If 
we confine the modification of our internal state to the com- 
ing and departing appearances or the motions in some delu- 
sive organic affections, we shall attain a large class of facts 
for our purpose. The deceptive phantoms before mentioned 
in some diseased or deranged or^an — as the colors from the 
pressed eye-ball, or a ringing sound in the ear, or a pain in 
the nerves — would give occasion for a constructing agency 
and thus for a modification of internal state, and thereby 
secure the consciousness of a passing time. But inasmuch 
as this sensation originates in the organism, and gives occa- 
sion for the self-conscious possessor of the organ only to be 
thus internally affected, the passing of the time can be of no 
significancy beyond his subjective being, and as exclusively 
his own time as above in the purely mental movements. So 
far, therefore, as there are such periods in organic experience, 
they may furnish their facts for our purpose. 

Perhaps the facts of dreaming may here give the best 



EXPERIENCE IN ONE SPACE AND TIME. 345 

illustration. A dream may be taken as a sensation in our 
subjective organism generally, inducing such intellectual 
construction as the state of the organism occasions ; and 
such, though only of the reproductive imagination, do yet 
induce a modification of the internal state, and thus the con- 
scious passing of a time. But none of us can bring the 
times of our dreams into one connected whole of a dreaming 
time for ourselves subjectively, much less put all the times 
of all dreaming in all persons into any one time, or identify 
the times passing in our dreams with our objective universal 
time, only as we have some substantial source for phenom- 
enal successions, and subject the times of our dreams to this 
one common standard which marks the progress of one 
universal time for all. 

We may lastly take the facts of any real phenomenal 
experience. My perceptions of phenomena through any 
organism are, so far as they are appearance in my conscious- 
ness, subjective only. The color, the sound, the touch, the 
taste, and the smell, are all in me subjectively; and the 
modification which their distinction and construction in con- 
sciousness occasions in my internal state gives the conscious- 
ness of a passing time, but this phenomenal passing in its 
periods is in my subjective consciousness only. I am not 
conscious that such modifications and such periods are pass- 
ing in others. This would demand that the others con- 
sciousness should become phenomenal in my consciousness. 
I have my own phenomenal coming and departing in con- 
sciousness, and another subject may have his ; but no con- 
sciousness of either can put the interrupted periods of one 
subject into one time, much less the periods of the two sub- 
jects of self-consciousness into one common time. Every 



346 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS LAW. 

subject judges that what has occasioned his perception of 
the phenomena is the same permanent substance occasion- 
ing the like perceptions for all; that the changing events 
originate in a source which is a common occasion for per- 
ceiving the same series of events by all ; and that the occa- 
sions for modifications of internal state are given alike to 
all ; and thereby the periods are the same to all, and are 
connected in the same one time for all. The substantial 
time-keeper gives the phenomena of moving hands over the 
dial-plate, and the tick of the seconds, and the periods of 
them in their series, as a standard for common experience ; 
and although the perceptions are only subjective and sepa- 
rate in the sense, yet the permanent sameness of substan- 
tial source in the thought connects them all in one nature, 
and in one time. Thus, in all the above facts is the colliga- 
tion of our hypothesis verified as universal Law. 



SECTION III. 

THE DETERMINATION OF AN EXPERIENCE IN ITS PARTICULAR 
PLACES AND PERIODS. 

All experience is but a medley of appearing and dis- 
appearing phenomena, except the phenomena are determined 
in their particular places and periods. And that we do 
judge phenomena to be each in its own place and period in 
universal space and time, and determine their relative bear- 
ings and distances from each other, needs no illustration ; 
since our experience has no connection in itself as a whole 
any further than such determination of particular phenom- 



EXPERIENCE IN PLACE AND PERIOD. 347 

ena in space and time is effected. The point for investigation 
is, to find the Law in the facts for such particular determin- 
ation. Will our hypothetical idea bind up within itself all 
the facts of a determination of particular phenomena to 
their places in space and their periods in time ? If so, 
the induction will evince this to be their law ; and thus that 
the understanding does determine the particulars of an 
experience in place and period, in accordance with our a 
priori idea of an understanding already attained. We 
shall, as before, take the particular determinations in space 
and in time separately. 

1. Particular determination of places in space. — All the 
phenomena of experience, we judge to be in one universal 
space ; and the law for this as already found in the facts is, 
the connection of these phenomena in a constant space-filling 
substance. We shall now show, that the law for aiR partic- 
ular determination in space is the fixing of the phenomena 
in their relative spaces, by their inherence in the constant 
space-filling substance. 

In all determination of particular phenomena in space 
there must be some movement. The place occupied must 
be determined in bearing and distance from other places, 
and we never take such bearings and distances without an 
intellectual moving agency which in its progress constructs 
the places and the lines between them. But no movement 
can be apprehended, except in reference to somewhat that is 
permanent. I only determine that I move, by a reference 
of myself to something which does not move. It thus be- 
comes the condition in all determination in place, that we 
have some permanent stand-point. 

But I find no permanent stand-point in my subjective 



348 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS LAW. 

being. When I am conscious of an inward constructing 
agency producing pure figures in space, the moveme?it is 
apprehended only in the passing of the agency throughout 
the diverse points in the primitive intuition. Subjectively, 
my pure diagrams have a relative bearing and distance from 
each other, but no determined relation to the places of any 
phenomena in universal space. Nor, from my subjective 
sensations any more than from my subjective pure intui- 
tions, do I attain to any permanent stand-point. If I press 
my eye-ball and fill the organ in consciousness with the floats 
ing fantastic colors, they may have bearings and directions 
from each other, but they give no permanent point for de- 
termining themselves in universal space. And this would 
be precisely the same with our real sensations, were only 
the subjective sensations regarded. That I had a real sen- 
sation in touch, and this continued so that in my conscious- 
ness I attained the construction of some definite figure and 
thus a place in space ; yet, if the perception in sensation 
were all that was given, I should not be able at all to deter- 
mine where in the universal space that place was, nor what 
direction and distance from the place of any other construc- 
tion by the touch. The result would be the same in the 
construction, whether the organ of touch moved over the 
resistance or the resistance moved over the organ, and the 
mere sensation would give no permanent stand-point from 
whence to take any bearings and distances. Sensation can 
give only the subjective ; and the subjective can never at- 
tain to any permanency from whence to determine particu- 
lar places in space. All the facts of our merely subjective 
experience are bound in this law, that we can determine 
them only in a subjective space, for that only has perma- 



EXPERIENCE IN PLACE AND PERIOD. 349 

nency in reference to our subjective self; but what relation 
this bears to any places in universal space we can not deter- 
mine, precisely because we can attain no permanent objec- 
tive. 

But, if now I take my own body, and think all the phe- 
nomena which it occasions in the sense to inhere in it as a 
constant space-filling substance, and thus that this body per- 
manently occupies a place ; I can in this determine the bear- 
ing and distances of all these phenomena inhering in the 
permanent substance of my own body, and say what are 
their relations in their places to each other. The direction 
and distance of the appearing head from the appearing foot 
through any sense of vision or of touch may readily be de- 
termined ; because there has been given the permanent 
space-filling substance in the understanding, which as fixed 
position in objective space occasions its own phenomena to 
appear in their own relative places, as inhering in it each in 
its own place. Just so far as you fill a space with the per- 
manent substance, you determine the relative places of its 
phenomena ; for so far, and only so far, you have the hypo- 
thetical law for it. 

But such determination of the relative places of the dif- 
ferent phenomena of my own body, can determine nothing 
of the relations to any places in universal space beyond it. 
I can not determine my relative position in the room I oc- 
cupy, by any permanent filling of a space with the substance 
of my own body alone. That will only avail to determine 
the relative places of the phenomena in my own body, and 
not the places of any phenomena beyond the space so occu- 
pied. I must first judge such phenomena to be the inhering 
qualities of a space-filling substance beyond and enclosing 



350 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS LAW. 

my body ; and I may then very well determine the relative 
places of the phenomena in my own body with those in the 
substance of the wall of the room in their particular places. 
All the hypothetical conditions are so far given, and so far a 
determined experience in particular places is effected. But 
still, all determination of place is confined to the space of 
the room, and we can not yet say where in space the room 
itself is. I look from the window of my room, and various 
phenomena appear to be moving past the space of the room 
which the window occupies ; but I can not determine 
whether the space of my room and myself in it are moving 
past the outer phenomena, or whether the phenomena are 
moving past the window of my room. My room may be 
the cabin of a steamboat, and I readily determine the rela- 
tive positions of all the places in the room ; but I can not 
yet say where in universal space the phenomena beyond are, 
in reference to the place of my room. I may find them to be 
the phenomena of another steamboat, but I can not yet say 
whether they are permanent and we are moving, or the con- 
trary ; or whether both are not moving in opposite direc- 
tions ; or, perhaps both in the same direction, though one 
be more rapid than the other, and thus the more rapid pass- 
ing by the other. Until I can attain some permanent space- 
filling substance in the judgment of the understanding — as 
a tree, a house, a hill upon the shore — which I at once 
recognize as occupying permanent place still beyond, I can 
not determine the relative bearings of any phenomena ex- 
ternal to my own room. The permanent substance on shore 
gives occasion for determining the direction and bearing of 
all the phenomena intervening. 

But facts in the same direction will still further confirm 



EXPERIENCE IX PLACE AND PERIOD. 351 

our hypothesis to be the universal law ; for this permanent 
substance on shore may be still transcended. We can not 
tell where in space the phenomena on the shore are, except 
as we have extended our thought to the earth itself, as per- 
manent space-filling substance, and determined its phenom- 
ena to be connected in it as permanent ground for their ap- 
pearance, and thus as fixed at determinate bearings and dis- 
tances from each other in their particular places. And then, 
if we would know the place in space of the earth itself, we 
have the higher stand-point to attain in the permanent 
space-filling substance of the sun, which determines all the 
phenomena of its planets and their satellites in their relative 
positions. And then, yet again, this planetary system can 
be determined in its place in space only by a higher perma- 
nent substance in the fixed stars, which considered as occu- 
pying each the same place in space beyond the region of 
our planetary system, may give the same law for the under- 
standing to determine the place of the system as, in the 
first illustration given, the place of any part of my own 
body. And then, whether all the fixed stars are indeed 
fixed in the same invariable place in universal space, or are 
not perhaps themselves planets carrying each their unseen 
systems around some higher center, can only be determined 
by attaining such phenomena as evince their inherence in 
such higher space-filling substance. Our hypothetical prin- 
ciple is thus a universal law. The notion of a permanent 
space-filling substance, connecting all the phenomena in their 
relative places through their inherence in this substance, 
must be given, or no determination of experience in partic- 
ular places in space is ever effected; and at once, and 
always, where such connective is given, the determining 



352 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS LAW. 

judgment in the understanding is readily and confidently 
made. 

The point for an absolute determination of all places in 
universal space would be some fixed substantial center, 
which never changes its place by a revolution around some 
higher center ; from which all centrifugal force goes out, and 
to which all gravitating force tends ; and thus making the 
universe of nature to be one sphere of substantial being 
with its inhering phenomena ever occupying as a whole the 
same place in universal space. Shall we ever determine 
such fixed center, which unmoved itself yet ever determines 
all motion relatively to itself? Surely not from experience. 
No experience can possibly rise to the absolute in anything ; 
therefore can never attain to an absolute determination of 
space. It can only determine the relative places within the 
space which is occupied by a permanent substance, and in 
which the inhering phenomena are fixed in their connection 
to their respective places. If we were placed upon the sup- 
posed absolute center to which all motion would have ulti- 
mate reference, it would be impossible for us to determine 
in experience our steadfast position. The understanding 
may think such a permanent stand-point ; but place the 
sense there and it could not see if it stood, or whether it 
moved about some higher unseen center. 

2. Particular determinations of periods hi Time. — 
Time has three modes of relation to phenomena, and we 
need to gather the facts in each, and see if they all come 
within the circumscription of our hypothesis for determin- 
ing particular periods in time. 

(1 .) Facts in the determination of particular periods in 
the perpetuity of time. — This general fact is every where 



EXPEEIENCE IN PLACE AND PEEIOD. 353 

apparent, that there is not a perpetual apprehending of a 
time in any self-consciousness. When there is a progressive 
modification of internal state, we may be conscious that a 
time is passing ; but when there is any interruption of the 
conjoining agency, there is an interruption in our conscious 
apprehending of a time. Such interruptions are frequently 
occurring in every experience. The intellectual agency is 
often so completely absorbed in other constructions, that we 
take no note of time. There are also reveries and musing 
meditations, paroxysms of delirium and fainting fits and the 
stupor of disease, and more especially the occurrence of 
sleep from the necessities of our animal constitution ; in all 
of which, the consciousness of an elapsing time is inter- 
rupted. To our subjective being these intervals in our con- 
sciousness have no significancy, and are a void of time as- 
truly as a void of all inner affection. Such chasms in any 
elapsing time effectually break up in our consciousness the 
perpetuit}^ of time. It is nevertheless a fact that we some- 
how determine time to be perpetual, and to have been con- 
tinually passing during these interruptions in our conscious- 
ness of all time, so that we as truly determine a period to 
our unconsciousness as to our conscious exercises. This can; 
be no intuition of the sense, but must somehow be a discur- 
sive judgment formed in the understanding. If I am sail- 
ing with the current of a stream in my conscious apprehen- 
sion, and am then wholly unconscious of any such movement 
through sleep or otherwise, and again awake in conscious- 
ness of the similar fact that I am sailing with the current of 
a river, certainly my interrupted apprehensions can not be 
so brought together, or the chasm of consciousness so 
bridged across, that I can perceive that I have been perpet- 



354 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS LAW. 

ually sailing with the current, nor that the currents in the 
two periods of apprehension are the same perpetual stream. 
If I determine such facts at all, it must be through some 
discursive judgment in the understanding. I must think 
the connections of these experiences through some media, 
which as data lie beyond the subjective experience itself. 
And here all the facts, in our determination of the inter- 
rupted j:>eriods of our experience to be-in perpetual time, 
will be brought into complete colligation by our hypotheti- 
cal condition of a perduring source, as the time-filling sub- 
stance to which the phenomena in their different periods all 
adhere. 

Thus, after a period of activity in consciousness, I fall 
asleep in my study-chair. After this interruption of con- 
sciousness, I again awake and would fain determine the con- 
tinuity of time in this interval when time had no significancy 
t© me. Certainly I do not attempt to make my intellectual 
agency pass through this chasm, and thereby construct the 
periods in consciousness that I may perceive a time has been 
perpetually passing. I have no diversity of instants in that 
interval of unconsciousness which I may conjoin in unity, 
and by this bring in conjunction the periods before and 
after, and thus make the time perpetual. I take a very dif- 
ferent course ; laying aside all function of intuition I seek 
to connect the periods only by a discursive operation of the 
understanding. I find some permanent source of varying 
phenomena which has existed through the interval, and 
whose coming and departing events have had their periods 
in this interval, and which have thus connected the periods 
through this subjective void of all time ; and I at once con- 
clude that time has been perpetual. Any such perduring 



EXPERIENCE IN PLACE AND PERIOD. 355 

source for coming and departing events will give a datum 
for such a discursive judgment, and all the facts of a deter- 
mination of the perpetuity of time through such a chasm 
will invariably rest upon it. 

Thus, I may take my watch, which has been a perduring 
source of varying events in the movements of the different 
hands over the dial-plate, or the undulations of air from the 
stroke at each swing of the balance-wheel. Those events 
as phenomena have not appeared in my experience, yet has 
the occasion for such phenomena perpetually existed, and I 
must thus think them connected in their continual periods, 
varying as the changes in the source went on ; and in the 
judgment of the understanding, I at once determine that a 
time has been perpetually passing, though in my subjective 
consciousness it had no significancy. 1 conclude thus, only 
in a discursive process that has gone from period to period 
through the notion of a perduring source in the understand- 
ing. As another fact, I may look at the falling sands 
through the permanent waist of the hour-glass ; and though 
I have been all unconscious of the varying phenomena, yet 
is this perduring source of such successive appearances for 
any perceiving sense that might have been present in con- 
sciousness, a sufficient datum for the understanding to de- 
termine that the occasions have had their periods, and that 
the time has been perpetually passing. The shadow of the 
gnomon on the sun-dial may give another fact within the 
same conditions. The perduring source as notional in the 
unde rstanding has been in existence through the interval of 
my unconsciousness, and given occasion for a continual per- 
ception of the moving shadow to any sense which might 
have received the content and have had its perpetuated time 



356 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS LAW. 

through all the moments ; and the void of time in conscious- 
ness is thus a perpetuation of time in the understanding. 
Only by such connection of adhering occasions in a perdur- 
ing source, do we determine any particular period to be in a 
perpetual time. 

And when no artificial chronometers are at hand, the 
same conditions are given in a thousand ways, each of which 
would be a new fact coming under the same hypothesis. 
Thus, I awake, and find the sunshine from my window has 
changed its position; or, perhaps the twilight of evening 
has succeeded to the clear daylight when my sleep com- 
menced ; or, the diminished warmth of my room from the 
neglected and expiring fire in the stove ; or, the diminished 
light and exhausted oil in my lamp ; any one of these or 
numberless other such occasions give the datum in a per- 
manent source of continual variations for the determination 
in the understanding, that a time has been perpetually pass- 
ing through all intervals of our unconsciousness. So in that 
void of all time to us which precedes our existence as self- 
conscious beings, or that which is yet to come beyond the 
present instant in consciousness, we readily determine a per- 
petuity to time and embrace all the experience of humanity 
in one perpetuity of duration. The permanent substances 
which give their phenomenal brightness in the heavens are 
lasting sources of adhering events for a continual experience, 
and thus become data for the determination of a perpetual 
time, which flows on in uninterrupted periods, independent 
of all consciousness of it. They are thus, what their Maker 
in the beginning designed they should be, " lights in the 
firmament of heaven to divide the day from the night, and 
that they may be for signs and for seasons, and for days and 



EXPERIENCE IN PLACE AND PERIOD. 357 

years." As far as we may think the perduriiig source to 
exist with its occasions for the adhering phenomena to come 
and depart, so far we can carry out our determinations of 
particular periods in a perpetuity of time, and give the 
chronology of nature ; but when that notion as necessary 
condition of all connection in time drops from the under- 
standing, the vacant thought has nothing for its support, 
and all determination of perpetuity to time is wholly im- 
practicable. 

We thus affirm, that all the facts in an actual determina- 
tion of particular periods to perpetual time, come completely 
within, and are wholly concluded by our hypothesis — that 
the connections of adhering events in one perduring source 
is the necessary condition for all such determination of an 
experience in perpetual time. We have in this no longer a 
mere hypothesis, but an actual universal Law. 

(2.) Facts in the determination of particular periods in 
the uniform succession of time. — We judge time to be in 
•uniformly progressive flow; that its stream does not turn 
back upon itself, nor wheel itself about in one perpetual 
cycle ; and that it is not by desultory leaps, nor paroxysms 
of quickened and retarded movement. But when only the 
subjective apprehension of a time is given, we determine 
nothing in reference to the ordered progress of its move- 
ment. Our dreams may give an apprehension of successive 
periods in any direction ; and our memories may follow 
back the tide of events, or begin at any past point and 
follow down again the old stream of our experience. Were 
there nothing but our subjective constructions of periods, 
our apprehension of time must be backward or forward, 
according to the contingent modifications of our internal 



358 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS LAW. 

state by the constructing movement. There is nothing in 
the subjective consciousness, which may serve as a perma- 
nent from which to determine the absolute direction or the 
rapidity of the current of time. How, then, do we deter- 
mine the particular periods in time to be in an ordered and 
uniform succession ? The facts will all be bound up in our 
hypothetical condition — that an ordered series of causation 
alone gives the datum for the determination of particular 
periods as uniformly progressive. 

Thus, as before, when I awake from my sleep, and would 
fain know how much of time has passed, I need to deter- 
mine, not only as before that there has been a perpetual 
passing of time and which is effected by any perduring 
source of adhering events, but, moreover, now I need to 
determine that this perpetual passing of a time has been in 
an ordered and uniform succession. A perpetual movement 
from period to period might be as the pendulum to and fro ; 
or, as the wheel on its axis revolving without progress ; or, 
as the waves on the surface of the lake varied indefinitely ; 
and there would be the notion of one perpetual source in 
which adhering events in their periods were continually 
recurring, and we might determine that all the periods 
belonged to a perpetual time ; but we must have some other 
data for determining that all the periods are in one uniform 
progress, as an ordered and even succession of time. When 
I look at my watch to determine how much time has passed, 
the datum which I get for my judgment is not merely that 
the substance is source for perpetual coming and departing 
events, but, moreover, is cause that the events can be only 
in one order and in uniform rapidity of succession. It is the 
abiding source and its events which suffices for perpetuity 



EXPERIENCE IX PLACE AND PERIOD. 350 

of time, but it is the series of cause and effect which can 
alone suffice for the determination of an ordered succession 
of time. If the watch might go either backwards or for- 
wards, or in a progressus of irregular rates of movement, 
there would be no datum for determining the onward flow 
of time, and none for determining uniformity of process by 
it. Thus with the hour-glass, the sun-dial, or any other 
artificial chronometer ; Ave take the notion not only of a 
perduring source, but also of an ordering cause, necessita- 
ting the source to give its altered events in uniform succes- 
sion. So far as we attain such a datum, we possess a chro- 
nometer ; and so far as there is any deficiency in these condi- 
tions, the capability of an accurate determination of suc- 
cessive time is defective. I may know that my stove has 
been gradually diminishing in warmth while I was sleeping, 
and thus the cause of the gradual settling of the mercury in 
my thermometer ; and in this case I could determine the 
movement of the mercury and its periods to be in one direc- 
tion, and so far it would be chronometer for the progess of 
time. But, I must also have the datum of uniformity of 
causation, before I can make it chronometer for the rapidity 
of time. Any notion of causation is sufficient in its varying 
events to determine a progressus of time, but only uniformity 
in the variations can make it practicable for us to determine 
the uniform successions of periods in time. 

Thus, although we readily determine that time is a pro- 
gressus and never a regressus, we attain to only a compara- 
tive and not an absolute determination of the even flow of 
time. We find it necessary to bring every chronometer to 
some comparative standard of an ordered series of causa- 
tion. The great standard is the revolution of the earth on 



360 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS LAW. 

its axis. Taking the earth as perduring source of the varied 
phenomena, and the cause of its revolutions as ordering the 
same in progressive and equable successions, we have the 
great chronometer by which all artificial time-keepers are to 
be regulated. As this revolution of the earth divides itself 
into the two portions of light and darkness, so it has been 
found convenient to give to the ordinary chronometers two 
revolutions to one revolution of the earth, thereby separately 
measuring the day and the night. An hour-glass may take 
any equable division of this as a twelfth, and be truly an 
hour-glass ; or a twenty-fourth, and be a half hour-glass. 
But in all the datum is the same — a causation ordering suc- 
cessive phenomena in accordance progressively and equably, 
with the revolutions of the earth. And now, that this is 
perpetually progressive is readily manifest. The causation 
is ever onward and not backward. One point of the earth's 
surface comes under the meridian after another, and these 
points can not alternate in the periods of their coming to 
the meridian, each with each. We thus determine the 
periods to be progressive and never regressive. But inas- 
much as the movement is a revolution, and each day repeats 
its causal variations in the same order ; how do we deter- 
mine that time has any other progress than a repetition of 
cycles ? The facts bring us again within the circumscrip- 
tion of the same hypothesis. Had we no causation but that 
which orders our diurnal revolution, we should not be com- 
petent to determine our regular progressus in time, and each 
day would be to us the old day over again ; as with only a 
whirling balloon in the open air of heaven, each turn would 
to the aeronaut be in the same place. But as a sight of the 
objects on the earth would give the data for determining 



.EXPEKIENCE IN PLACE AND PERIOD. 361 

that his revolutions varied from place to place, so do the 
thousand onward moving events give the data for determin- 
ing that the diurnal revolutions of the earth vary in their 
periods, and are each a time further on in the opening of 
eternity than the last. The on-going of the objective events 
in nature are right onward from day to day, and not wheeled 
into cycles as the earth rolls on her axis, and thus each day 
though a periodic revolution has a different period from its 
predecessor. Were all the causes in nature only repeating a 
certain circuit, and coming about again as in a vortex only 
to go over again the same effects in the same order, their 
experience could only induce the repetition of the same cir- 
cuit of inner modifications, and time could be determined 
only as a perpetual revolution in the same cycle. So also, 
should nature at any moment cease the onward development 
of cause and effect and turn directly back upon her order 
of connections, making every where what had been the con- 
sequent to an antecedent to become the antecedent to the 
same, the determination of time could only be that of a 
regressus, and yesterday would return again to our experi- 
ence, and life roll itself backward through the consciousness 
in an exactly reversed order of periods as of phenomena. 
But, while the earth repeats her revolutions, the causes in 
nature do not turn from a direct on-going in their developed 
effects, and we in these attain our data for determining that 
every recurring day is a new day further on in the period 
of time, and not the same day repeated, nor a return again 
to the old day which had passed. The successive progress 
of time is thus readily determined from the successive on- 
going of events. 

But an absolute equality in the onward progress of time 
16 



362 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS LAW . 

is not thus determined, nor indeed can in any way be deter- 
mined from any possible experience. Here are facts so 
much aside from the class before given, and which would so 
little have been expected to come within the same connec- 
tion, and yet which do surprisingly evince themselves to 
stand bound in the same hypothesis, that they may be well 
considered as an example of a consilience of facts leaping 
within our hypothetical condition from a distance — and thus 
add the stronger confirmation that our hypothesis is the 
universal law for all determination of successive time in an 
understanding. Thus, I may very well determine that the 
pulsations at my wrist go on in an ordered succession, for 
I have a perpetual cause in the palpitating heart for suc- 
cessive pulsations in their progressive periods. But I can 
not say that the pulsations and their periods are equable in 
their successions, precisely because I can not determine that 
the development of the causation into effect is equable. The 
phenomena as effects come into experience, but the motional 
cause can never come into experience. I may trace the 
phenomenal pulsations up to the alternate action of the 
heart in systole and diastole, and determine that this con- 
traction and dilation is in successive progression, for I think 
the same cause for this as phenomenal effect that I do for 
the pulsations; but yet it is only the phenomenal that has 
come within consciousness, while the causal efficiency is 
necessarily notional in the understanding and can never be 
made appearance in the sense. I have no means, therefore, 
of determining the absolute equality of the succession in the 
cause, and can only attempt such determination of equable 
succession in the effects. I compare the phenomenal effects 
with those in another series of cause and effect. I find, on 



EXPERIENCE IN PLACE AND PERIOD. 363 

comparison with the on-going phenomena of my watch, that 
the pulsations for one minute are, say seventy-five ; and, in 
some minute of another hour, I find them to be less or more, 
say seventy for the less and eighty for the more numerous. 
How shall I determine which successive periods are the true 
successions in time ? Only by taking the causation in the 
one case or the other to be an assumed equable efficiency, 
and thus judging the phenomenal effect of that to be equa- 
ble in its periods, and then determining the phenomenal 
effects in their successive periods in the other compared with 
that as a standard. If my watch is taken as having kept on 
its equable efficiency in developing its successive effects, I 
shall determine that the pulsations have been faster or slower 
in the different periods, from some inequality of causation 
in the heart. 

But, how determine that the causal efficiency of the 
watch has been equable ? I may compare it with the falling 
sands of an hour-glass, or the oscillations of a pendulum 
regulating the descent of the same weight, and may assume 
that the efficiency of gravitation is an equable cause in the 
same place on the earth, and thus, if the watch agrees 
thereto, that its efficiency has been uniform. But, if now I 
should compare that watch, thus tested, with a sun-dial 
through the year, I should find perpetual inequalities of 
movement faster and slower than the dial, varying in 
extremes of fifteen minutes, and making the difference 
between mean-time and apparent-time on any given day in 
the year. How shall I determine where is tne equable 
efficiency now ? The watch has been tested by the constant 
efficiency of gravitation in nature, and yet it disagrees with 
the revolutions of the earth in their periods, which are the 



364 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS LAW. 

phenomenal effects of the same causal efficiency. Is the 
same cause in nature contradictory in its own effects ? But 
all these conflicting phenomena leap together within the 
same conditions, when we know that the earth is running 
its elliptical course about the sun, and varying its rate of 
movement proportionally from perihelion to aphelion, and 
that thus its equal revolutions on its axis will bring the 
same place on the earth to its meridian, at different inter- 
vals, in different parts of its orbit, and to just the degree 
and on the very days of the year indicated by the facts of 
disagreement between the clock and the sun-dial ; and that, 
therefore, those different days in the year are just so much 
longer or shorter in their periods in absolute time. We 
determine the equable succession of time on the hypothesis 
only that the higher causation of gravity, in its force from 
the sun, is equable in its production of effects at equal 
distances. 

It might here be said, that for all which has yet been 
determined of the equable succession of time, there may 
notwithstanding be as wide variations between a correct 
chronometer and some years, as between this chronometer 
and some days in the year. And so it may be. And if this 
were so found as a fact from any comparison of widely dif- 
ferent years with the same accurate time-keeper of centuries, 
it would only the more confirm our hypothesis ; for we 
could only determine the equalization of the discordant 
times, by taking the higher stand-point of causation, and 
thinking our sun, with its whole attendant system of worlds, 
to be wheeling on in its grand ellipse around this causal effi- 
ciency in one of the foci of its orbit, and conditioning the 
same disparity of years in this great cycle, as before of days 



EXPERIENCE IN PLACE AND PERIOD. 365 

in the annual circuit of the earth in its orbit. Nor should 
we then be any nearer the attainment of an absolute mea- 
sure of time. The only position for such determination 
would be the absolute center of all gravitation, fixed in its 
one position in the immensity of space, and ensphering and 
revolving all phenomenal being about itself. And if we 
stood at just such central point with an eye to perceive the 
rolling universe about us, how should we see that our own 
position did not move in absolute space ? How see that the 
revolutions were not unequal in absolute time ? Causation 
may be producing the faint pulsations of an artery or wheel- 
ing the universe on its center ; but in all cases it is the con- 
nected series which determines the periods to be an ordered 
progress in time, and the even working of the efficiency 
which determines the equable progress in the successive 
periods. We have, therefore, a sufficiently broad induction 
of facts to determine that our hypothetical condition is a 
universal Law, and needs to be held as hypothesis no 
longer. 

(3.) Facts in the determination of particular periods in 
simultaneous time. — We have varied phenomena each in 
their own periods, and which are alternately appearing and 
disappearing in the sense, so that when one appears the 
other has disappeared, and when the last appears again, the 
first has also again disappeared ; and, though they are never 
given in consciousness together, we yet determine them to 
be together in the same time. This can not be from think- 
ing them to be the adhering events of the same source : for 
that can only determine them in the judgment as perpetual 
in the same one whole of universal time, not that they are 
together in the same one period of universal time. Nor can 



366 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS LAW. 

it be from thinking them to be the dependent effects of the 
same cause ; for that can determine them only as successive 
in the universal time, and thus they can not be simultaneous. 
Since, then, the perception never brings them into the con- 
scious experience, simultaneously, and no datum yet consid- 
ered gives them in the judgment of the understanding as 
simultaneous, the inquiry yet to be made is — under what 
law do these facts of a determination to particular periods 
as simultaneous events arrange themselves ? Our hypothet- 
ical condition is — that they must be connected in the com- 
nxunion of a reciprocal influence. This last induction of 
facts will exhaust all our hypotheses for determining partic- 
ular periods in time : and if the hypothetical condition be 
found to be the actual Law, our task will be completed. 

Thus, when I have the phenomena of continuous motion 
over the graduated points on the dial-plates of two clocks, 
in such a position that when I perceive one the phenomena 
of motion over the other is not perceived, and thus, alter- 
nately ; I may say of each when thought to be events from 
a perduring scurce, that their periods must belong to one 
perpetual time ; and also, when thought to be effects from 
an ordering series of causation, that the periods in each must 
be in progressing succession ; but, as I can not see the phe- 
nomena of motion in both together, I can not perceive the 
moments of motion in both to be simultaneous ; nor can 
the notions of perduring source and perpetual cause enable 
me at all to determine, that the motions in both pass any 
given points in both at the same moment. But if now 
these phenomena of motions over the graduated points of 
the two dial-plates are apprehended as on opposite sides of 
a tower, and that they are the two faces of the same chapel- 



EXPERIENCE IN PLACE AND PEEIOD. 367 

clock, and have each a communion reciprocally, so that one 
can not be modified in its motion but the same modification 
must be communicated also to the other ; I have then a da- 
tum in the understanding by which I may well, discursively 
through this datum, determine that their movements are si- 
multaneous. With such a reciprocity of influence I can, and 
without such I can not, and in point of fact it is only by 
such that I do, determine any phenomena of alternately per- 
ceived movements to be simultaneous. 

I may touch the opposite scales of a balance, or the 
counter-weights suspended on each side of a pulley alter- 
nately — and the same will also apply to alternate vision, or 
perception through any organ of sense — and my apprehen- 
sion may be, that when one scale or one weight has been 
raised the other has been found lower down, or the reverse ; 
and if I had nothing more than the alternate perceptions in 
the positions of the phenomena, I could not determine 
whether these alternations of place were successive or simul- 
taneous. The interval in perception will admit, that the 
displacement should be either in a successive or a simultane- 
ous time. If I should somehow get the notion of two alter- 
nate causes each producing its own effect, one lifting and 
the other depressing the weights ; this notion of alternate 
cause in the understanding would necessitate the judgment, 
that the displacement was also alternate and thus successive ; 
but when the notion of the communion of reciprocal influ- 
ence is assumed in the understanding, so that the action and 
reaction must synchronize, the judgment must conclude in 
the simultaneous displacement of the weights. And pre- 
cisely the same hypothesis applies where no phenomenal 
connection, like the scale-beam or the pulley-rope, brings 



368 THE UNDERSTANDING IN ITS LAW. 

the communion within the intuitions of any organism of 
sense. 

Two voyagers, at opposite sides of the earth, find each a 
high tide in the ocean, but surely no human perception can 
settle the determination that they are contemporaneous. 
An accurate chronometer, when the two men should subse- 
quently meet and compare their experience, might be the 
medium for determining that the tides were simultaneous ; 
but the accuracy of the chronometer must ultimately be 
tested by its comparison with the action and reaction of 
gravitating bodies in the diurnal revolution of the earth. 
And such notion of the reciprocal influence of gravitating 
forces, acting and reacting upon the ocean according to the 
positions of the sun and moon, exclusive of the chronometer, 
would be sufficient for determining the simultaneousness of 
the tides by each man at once and in his own place. This 
wholly imperceptible force of gravity is, as notion in the 
understanding alone, an efficient connective of the phenom- 
ena; and as valid a condition for the judgment of contem- 
porary being in the tides, as if it could be made phenome- 
nal like the scale-beam. The reciprocity of influence must 
produce the tides coetaneously. And precisely this medium 
of communion in the reciprocal action of gravitation per- 
vades the universe. It is the grand and only law, as notion 
in the understanding, by which we can determine the times 
of any phenomena of revolutions, and transits, and eclipses, 
and occultations, and full and change through all the heav- 
enly bodies. What is now going on in regions of space un- 
seen, coetaneously with the phenomena which now appear ; 
and what events in all past history were contemporaneous 
in occurrence with some remarkable phenomenon in the 



EXPERIENCE IN PLACE AND PERIOD. 309 

heavens — as an eclipse, or the full moon — and thus often the 
settlement of long lines of events in disputed chronology ; 
and what phenomenal occurrences in the revolutions of the 
earth, the tides of the ocean, the appearances in the heav- 
ens, and even the coming and departing of comets, simulta- 
neously with each other ; all are determined on the hypo- 
thesis alone, of the fixed connections through all the phe- 
nomena of nature of a universal and everlasting communion 
in the reciprocities of causation, which modifies all from 
each and each from all simultaneously. Cut off* in thought 
the departing comet from this reciprocal communion, and 
you have cut it off from all connection in the understanding ; 
and you can no more determine its sameness of time with 
the phenomena of nature, than you can its directions and 
distances in space from the places occupied in nature. Its 
law of all connection is gone, and it is no longer a part of 
our system, nor is it any more even a determinate part of 
the universe. It is somewhere its own universe, in its own 
space and its own time ; but it is not ensphered and turning 
in unity with universal nature in its space and its time. 

It is, then, sufficiently shown in the facts, that the hypo- 
thesis of a communion in the notion of a reciprocal influence 
for the determination of phenomena as simultaneous in 
their periods in time, is no longer hypothesis but a veritable 
Law in the facts. And inasmuch as we have now found 
the law in the facts comprehensively for all determination 
of phenomena in place and in period, and can now see that 
the law in the facts is precisely the correlative of our d 
priori idea of an understanding ; we may unhesitatingly 
affirm, that here is a true and valid psychological science. 
We know the Understanding completely, both in its tran- 
scendental Idea and in its empirical Law. 



APPENDIX TO THE UNDERSTANDING. 



AN ONTOLOGICAL DEMONSTRATION OF THE VALID BEING OP 
THE NOTIONAL. 



The doctrine of immediate perception of objects was 
with Reid in this form, that an impression on the organ 
mysteriously induced a state of mind that was a conception 
of the thing itself, and accompanied with the necessary be- 
lief that the object had a real outer existence. With 
Brown, the state of mind in an organic sensation came 
immediately within consciousness, and this was known 
directly, but the external cause was known only as correla- 
tive to the organic impression. Sir William Hamilton 
makes perception to be the product of a " presentative fac- 
ulty " and to be directly and immediately cognizant of ob- 
jects, but in this peculiar manner. Causation is always 
duplex, involving action and reaction. The object and the 
organ are thus necessarily present and in contact in all cases 
of organic impression. The whole exterior of the nervous 
system is open to touch, and this nervous organization is a 
compound of body and mind, and is one of the elements in 
the cause of perception and the outer matter in contact 
with it is the other element. All perception is thus at last 
resolved into touch. At the point of contact the mind and 
its object are together, and the intellect immediately apprc- 



VALID BEING OF THE NOTIONAL. 371 

hends the outness and the extension of the object, and by 
muscular pressure immediately knows the hardness or 
roughness of the object. But the human mind can know 
nothing that does not thus make itself present to it in nerv- 
ous contact. The theory can never explain vision or hear- 
ing to be immediately cognizant of outer objects, even if it 
were allowed to be true for touch, for only rays of light 
come in contact with the optic nerves, and only waves of 
air with the auditory nerves, and all we could thus know 
would be the color of the light and the sound of the air, 
not at all the extension or other qualities of the outer and 
distant object. And even for touch, it must assume that 
mind itself becomes extension in the extended nervous or- 
ganism, for it knows the extension of the object only from 
knowing its own extension in the extended nervous system. 
Mind and nerve must be -one, or else the unextended mind 
could not know the extended nervous body, and thereby 
know the extended outer object. 

But Hamilton is himself a thorough Kantian in reference 
to time and space. He holds space to be " a mere subjec- 
tive state," and wholly " an a priori form of the Imagina- 
tion." Could, then, the mind immediately know the object 
as extended, this extension could only be in subjective 
space, and it would be utterly impossible to determine the 
objects of different persons to any one common space for 
all. It would leave out all data for any possibility of prov- 
ing valid being to the subjective world of mind and the ob- 
jective world of matter. Our Faith might be assumed to 
pass on beyond subjective knowledge, and admit of object- 
ive being in one common space and common time for all, but 
our Philosophy can never attain such a station. And our 



372 APPENDIX TO THE UNDERSTANDING. 

faith can only be resolved into a divine constitution; so 
God has made us to believe, but it can not be said that so 
God has made mind and matter to be. 

McCosh clearly sees that Hamilton has really yielded up 
all knowledge of an outer world and played entirely into 
the hands of the skeptic, and goes back to the assumption 
without explanation that we immediately perceive things 
themselves, and that all qualities, hot and cold, good smells 
and bad smells, etc., are already in the things themselves 
and not the affections which the things produce in us. 

By none of these views of perception, and of knowledge 
only through perception and in consciousness, is it possible 
to deliver ourselves from the skeptic who presses his doubts 
of the validity of immediate perception for things in them- 
selves, or if things themselves are assumed to be given by 
perception to the consciousness, who presses his doubts of 
the validity of any such assumed consciousness. The per- 
ception and the consciousness are in these cases the ultimate, 
and there is no possible way for philosophically determining 
anything about perception and consciousness themselves. 
For suppose we push this skeptic fully out to the extreme 
conseqence of denying validity to consciousness, not from 
any arbitrary questioning, but from logical deductions or 
direct opposing reasons, and force him to admit, as cer- 
tainly we may, notwithstanding all his reasons, that his con- 
scious experience of the fact of his doubting is itself no 
more valid than the other facts in experience which he 
assumes to doubt, and thereby oblige him to admit that he 
must doubt the fact of his doubting, and is wholly skeptical 
in reference to the fact of his own skepticism, what then ; 
have we thus demonstrated to him that he does know ? 



TALID BEING OF THE NOTIONAL. 373 

Have we not rather pushed him further back into the dark- 
ness of a deeper doubt, and made his skepticism all the more 
incorrigible ? He is forced to admit that he doubts whether 
his own skepticism has any reality, and that nothing can be 
known, not even the fact that he doubts every thing. But 
is here such a reductio ad absurdum as must legitimate an 
opposite conclusion ? Can this prove that he does know ? 
or is there here any subversion of the ground of his skepti- 
cism ? Certainly, such crowding him with his own admis- 
sions is only pushing him further from all hope of coming to 
the light, or that to him any light can be. If you can not 
meet his skepticism in its reasons, you only make him a 
more confirmed and incorrigible skeptic by driving him out 
to the extremes of his own logic. 

We have now a position where we can fairly and fully 
meet and annul all skepticism of the valid being of mind 
and of matter in its very sources, and annihilate the false 
data from whence it assumes to question perception and 
consciousness. Materialism, Idealism in its double form, 
and universal Pyrrhonism may now clearly, fairly, intelligi- 
bly, be met and conquered. We shall find Materialism and 
Idealism to be simply defective, true so far as they go but 
false because they are each only half-truths, and that univer- 
sal Pyrrhonism is wholly error, and founded on a sophisti- 
cal illusion. The materialist knows matter but doubts of 
the being of mind ; the idealist admits mind to be but 
doubts the being of the material ; and the Pyrrhonist 
doubts all, for he deems man's original and fundamental 
faculties for knowing to be self-contradictory. It is compe- 
tent now to demonstrate Idealism against Materialism, and 
Materialism against Idealism, and thus prove a dualism of 



374 APPENDIX TO THE UNDERSTANDING. 

both inind and matter, and also competent to expose and 
remove the sophism on which a necessary and universal 
skepticism has been maintained. 

1. The Demonstration of Idealism against Materialism. 
The scholastic dictum nihil est in inteUectu, quod non prius 
fuit in sensu, is the starting-point to the logical skepticism 
which doubts the knowledge of all but material being. The 
logical process may be from the origin to the completed 
perception, or from the full perception back to the origin. 
In the first logical form it goes thus — all knowledge must 
be through the organic sensation and the relative modifica- 
tions which may be by reflection given t j the objects of 
sense. But all the sensation must be induced by something 
that impresses and thus affects the organic sensibility ; and 
as this impression is from matter without and made upon a 
material organism, it is not possible to trace the material 
action beyond the material affection. In the second logical 
process it goes thus — inasmuch as whatever is in the intel- 
lect has first been in the sense, and the organic sense can be 
impressed and affected only by matter, therefore all that is 
known may be referred back to some material impression 
upon a material organ. Any knowing of an object which is 
not from and of the material world must, therefore, be taken 
as a delusion, and the object a mere chimera. 

But now, instead of the outer material impressing the 
organic material, and inducing a sensation in the organ as 
first and only condition for knowing, we have found that an 
intellectual agency may, solely from an anticipation of con- 
tent in the sense, determine all that is possible to be given 
in the sense ; and also, that from the very conception of a 
force in space, the intellect may itself determine all that sub- 



VALID BEING OF THE NOTIONAL. 375 

stances and causes can connect in a judgment of the under- 
standing ; and that both in the sense we perceive, and in the 
understanding we judge, only precisely according to these 
determining conditions. Hence it demonstratively follows, 
that the material is not conditional for all knowing, but that 
the intellect from its own anticipation of sensible content, 
and its own conception of notional substance and cause, and 
with no content in an organism from without, can proceed 
at once to the knowledge of what it is possible for a sense and 
an understanding to accomplish. There is an actual know- 
ing that is wholly independent of all organic affection and 
sensation. And further, even when the organism is affected, 
nothing can be either distinctly or definitely perceived, except 
as the intellectual agency intervenes and works the content 
given into a completed phenomenon. And thus, when the 
phenomenal is given, no ordered experience can occur in 
the consciousness, except as the intellectual agency connects 
the phenomena in their substances, causes, and reciprocal 
influences. 

And yet further, as proof that the intellectual is not only 
independent of the material, but is itself permanent and 
abiding through all its changing exercises, and is ever one 
and the same mind, we have the conviction in clear con- 
sciousness that all our appearances are in one and the same 
light of consciousness not only, but that all the conscious- 
ness of objects must be in one self, or there could, in the 
nature of the case, be no perpetuation and connection in one 
order of experience. 

And as more manifestly conclusive still, we have the un- 
doubted fact that all men have the consciousness of a per- 
during time through all the vicissitudes of their experience, 



376 APPENDIX TO THE UNDERSTANDING. 

and yet no matter how permanent the nature of things 
might be which occasioned such experience, it never still 
could occur in one subjective time to us, were it not that 
the one unvaried subjective agency constructed the phenom- 
ena and connected them in an unbroken series so far as the 
consciousness extends. 

All this demonstrates a unity and permanence of the In- 
tellect that can consist with nothing but the valid being of 
the one individual Mind. 

2. The Demonstration of Materialism against Ideal- 
ism. — The form of Idealism which is given in the Berkleian 
Sensationalism has already been disposed of, in the valid 
being of the phenomenal appended to the Sense. The phe- 
nomena having been proved real, their connection in an 
ordered experience will depend upon the same permanent 
substance and cause, as a notional, which we shall apply to 
the form of transcendental Idealism, and will need no other 
and separate consideration. The German form of Idealism 
as transcendental, or the ultimate result of the critical phi- 
losophy, is as follows. Assuming the very opposite dictum 
fundamental for Materialism, Idealism affirms that all sensa- 
tion is from the intellect. The intellectual agency produces 
all that is phenomenal, and connects all in unity by a deter- 
mined process of dialectical development. Beginning in 
pure thought as it goes on spontaneously under the control 
of an absolute law, the speculation puts itself within and as 
identical with the movement, and follows out, without fore- 
casting, the entire subjective process. The pure spontane- 
ous thinking is at first self-absorbed and single in the logical 
movement, and thus all self-consciousness is impossible. As 
the process goes on, and the products of the thinking be- 



VALID BEING OF THE NOTIONAL. 311 

come set and stated in particular stages of the development, 
they stand out in an orderly and determined connection 
each with each, and make in themselves a natural series. 
These become conditions and limitations in the spontaneity 
of thought, and forbid that thought should further go on in 
self-absorption and unconscious development. The products 
become distinguished from the process, the connected series 
of thought stands out separate from the thinking, and as 
other than the intellectual agency they become objective to 
it, and in the consciousness there appears a duality as the 
self and the not-self, and thus self-finding on one side is at 
the same time a finding an objective nature of things on the 
other side. Thought, thus, in spontaneous development 
originates its products which limit and condition its sponta- 
neity, and which as thus made objective to itself become an 
ordered series of experience, and stand out in the conscious- 
ness as the regular ongoings of the external world of na- 
ture. The Sense is but the Intellect giving objectivity to its 
own logical creations, and the world of matter is the lim- 
iting of the process of thought by its own ideals. The 
space and the time in which they appear are relative only 
to the products, and are objective in the same way as the 
thoughts. 

Now, let it be admitted that an intellectual agency may 
pass on in just such an ordered development of thought, 
and awake in self-consciousness to find its own products stand- 
ing out as other than itself, and objective to itself, and thus 
that these products become phenomena and have their rela- 
tive places and periods, yet will it be utterly impossible, in 
any way, to bring them into a determined order of experi- 
ence which may stand in one common space and one com- 



378 APPENDIX TO THE UNDERSTANDING. 

mon time for all. So far as the whole could be apprehended 
in their places as contiguous place to place, or as the more 
remote could be reached through the contiguous places in- 
tervening, the determination of all in their places relatively 
to the place of the whole would be easy, and the contem- 
plating mind would so far have them all in one space. But 
when there was any break in the contiguity from any lapse 
of the connecting intellect, it would sunder place from place, 
and neither distance nor direction could be determined 
across the chasm. The same subject of consciousness 
would have his own experience dissolved, and his phenom- 
ena standing together in their patches of places that could 
not be put into any one space which should hold them all. 

And so far as these phenomena could be apprehended as 
continuous in their periods, or as the earlier could be 
reached by consciously remembered successions, then their 
periods relatively to each other in the time of the whole 
might be easily determined. But when there was any cessa- 
tion in the connecting process there would come a void in 
the linked successions, and the same subject of conscious- 
ness would have his continuance of tfrne dissolved with no 
possibility of renewing the connection. The same subject 
could not keep up a perpetuated experience in any one space 
or any one time. 

But further, admit an uninterrupted experience, and thus 
a perpetuation of contiguous places and continuous periods, 
and therefore to the subject the capability to determine all 
his experience to one space and one time, he would still be 
unable to put his experience into any one common space 
and one common time with others. His phenomena, places, 
and periods, and thus his whole experience, space, and time, 



VALID BEING OF THE NOTIONAL. 379 

are wholly restricted to himself in his own subject, and 
what this may be relatively to others, he can not determine 
for them, nor they for him. Each one is shut in upon him- 
self, and his process of thinking and connecting in self- 
consciousness is isolate, and no one can determinately put 
his experience into another's places and periods, and make 
it to have its connections in one common space and one 
common time with others. 

But we have now made it manifest, that all experiences 
are determined in the same one space and one time for all 
the human family, through the medium of a notional in the 
understanding. At whatever place or period any one mem- 
ber of the human family has lived, and had his experience of 
the phenomena and their vicissitudes in the world of nature 
about him, he knows how to connect them in the same one 
space and the same one time with all the experiences of the 
race, and that such places and periods for individual experi- 
ence have their relationship in this one space and one time 
to the places and periods for the experiences of all others. 
This demonstrates that the experience of the race is not 
ideal and merely an objectifying of their own thoughts. 
The proof is conclusive that there is a substantial nature of 
things, and a perpetual causal efficiency working on in the 
material world. 

Also, from the now determined law of phenomenal con- 
nections in the notions of substances, causes, and reciprocal 
influences, it is competent to show that a credulous or super- 
stitious fancy, by false judgments, may introduce the follow- 
ing forms of preternatural visions, but which will exhaust 
all the methods of dealing in " lying wonders." There may 
be assumed to be appearances in space with no substantial 



380 APPENDIX TO THE UNDEESTANPING, 

filling of space, and here we may have any form of ghosts and 
spiritual apparitions. Or there may be assumed to be events 
appearing that come and depart with no perduring source 
out of which they arise, and we shall have all the illusions 
of magic, and the legerdemain of jugglers and conjurers. 
Or there may be pretended to be an apprehension of future 
events without the causal connections, and there will be all 
the deceptions of fortune-tellers and soothsayers. Or finally 
there may be claimed to be communion with no reciprocal 
media, and under this we shall have all the assumptions of 
clairvoyance and the pretended revelations of the mesmeric 
sleep. These are all the forms of judgments that may be 
falsified in their connections, and are thus the only methods 
in which it can be attempted to enter into an experience 
neither natural nor supernatural. The necessary notional 
connections are here discarded, and the miraculous interven- 
tions of the supernatural are not claimed, and thus all the 
mystery must be assumed to lie in somewhat that is aside 
from nature as the preternatural. Put by themselves, all 
such appearances must be phantoms in a maze, and would 
constitute a world that could not become intelligible nor 
give an experience that could be determined in any one space 
and one time as common to all. If there were not already 
a substantial and causal nature of things, it could not be 
determined where the ghosts were nor when they appeared. 
A mere sense world, or a merely ideal world, could never 
give an experience for all in a space and time for all. 

3. An outline of the demonstration against Universal 
Pyrrhonism. — This skepticism deduces its conclusions from 
the alleged contradiction of the consciousness by the reason. 
The undoubted universal conviction of consciousness is that 



YALID BEING OF THE NOTIONAL. 381 

we perceive external objects immediately, and not some 
image or ideal representation of them. Reason, on the 
other hand, directly falsifies such convictions, and demon- 
strates that often at least the real outer object can not be in 
the sensibility, and that when it does come in contact, it can 
not be the object but only the sensation which may be 
directly perceived. In all cases, not the object, but some 
intermediate representative thereof, must be that which is 
actually perceived, and at best we must know the outer 
objects by this intermediate representative. 

Here, then, two original and independent sources of 
knowledge terminate in direct and unavoidable contradic- 
tion. Clear consciousness may not be questioned, nor its 
convictions resisted. A clear deduction of reason may not 
be gainsay ed, but its demonstration must compel assent. 
One may not be permitted to correct the other, for they are 
both original and independent ; nor can one expound the 
other, for there can be no exposition authoritative of one 
over the other. When one source of knowledge comes in 
different ways to opposite convictions, an exposition may 
be made by an independent examination of the media of 
knowledge. When I perceive the same phenomenon through 
different colored glasses, or as passing from a rarer to a 
denser medium, such explanation of the contradiction is 
practicable between the two perceptions, but here the con- 
tradiction is affirmed to lie between clear consciousness and 
legitimate reasoning ; and all that can be said is that they 
subvert each the other, and all ground of confidence in our 
whole intelligent being falls hopelessly away forever. 

But, now, in our psychological examination of percep- 
tion and judgment, we have attained the complete Idea of 



382 APPENDIX TO THE UNDERSTANDING. 

the whole process, and we have also found the actual Law 
in the facts, and here we have found exact harmony and not 
contradiction. The Idea in the reason, and the Law in the 
facts as given in consciousness, are in the accordance of per- 
fect correlates ; there must then be some false element some- 
where in this alleged conclusion of inevitable contradictions. 
We may also affirm further, that the data are given by 
which we may detect the fallacy on which rests this whole 
superstructure of absolute doubt, and show just how and 
where the fallacy is made an occasion for surreptitiously 
bringing in so fatal a skepticism. 

The data attained in Rational Psychology may be used as 
follows : The content which is given in sensation becomes 
an occasion for a spontaneous intellectual operation of Dis- 
tinction, and thereby the quality is brought into distinct 
consciousness. The constructing intellectual agency gives 
to it definite form in the consciousness, and thereby the per- 
ception is perfected and the phenomenon complete. The 
content as sensation, while it occasions the intellectual 
agency in discriminating and constructing, determines it 
also according to its own conditions, and is thus objective in 
its reality, as opposed to the intellectual agency which is 
subjective in its reality. All this is brought within the 
immediate consciousness, and is thus a direct and immediate 
perception. So far, our psychological conclusions confirm 
the first fact assumed by the skeptic as his preparation of 
the ground for his deduction of universal Pyrrhonism ; viz., 
that the universal conviction of consciousness is that we 
perceive the object immediately. 

But the fact further is, that this distinct and definite 
quality is all that the sense can reach, and all that conscious- 



VALID BEING OF THE NOTIONAL. 383 

ness can testify to as immediate in its own light. That 
causality, whatever it may be, which gave this content to 
the sensibility and thus in its affection induced sensation, is 
not itself given m the sensation, nor can it be known as 
immediately in the consciousness. It is not at all perceived, 
but must be attained, if known at all, through some other 
faculty than that of the sense. The qualities of the rose — 
color, fragrance, smoothness, weight, taste, etc., as given in 
any and all organs of sense — are immediately perceived; 
but what perception ever attained the rose itself, as other 
than its qualities ? The rose, as causality for affecting the 
sensibility through the content given, is not an object for 
the consciousness at all, and is not, therefore, in the testi- 
mony of any consciousness, immediately perceived. Reason 
only affirms that this causality, which is back of its per- 
ceived qualities, is not perceived ; and certainly no con- 
sciousness contradicts this. Consciousness confirms this, so 
far as it may, by its negation of all testimony about it. It 
denies that any thing back of the qualities ever becomes an 
object to it. And the same might also be shown of the 
inner phenomena. The acts, as affecting the internal state 
in any mental exercise, come in to immediate perception, 
as they come immediately within the light of consciousness . 
but whose consciousness ever testified that his own mind, as 
causality for these acts, had ever been immediately per- 
ceived? Consciousness affirms one thing, an immediate per- 
ception of qualities ; and reason does not at all contradict 
this, but affirms and a priori demonstrates it. Reason also 
affirms one thing — whatever it may be which is under or 
back of the qualities, and is causality for their coming within 
the sensibility that they may thus be brought by the intel- 



384 APPENDIX TO THE UNDERSTANDING. 

lectual agency into the light of consciousness — that this 
causality as thing in itself can not be immediately perceived ; 
and consciousness does by no means affirm in contradiction, 
but, as far as it may, sustains reason by a negation of all 
testimony about it. The whole basis of the skepticism, so 
broad and startling in its consequences, is thus found to be 
the old sophism ftgurce dictionis, so often deluding us by its 
fallacies, and which is at once demolished when our analysis 
enables us to see the false play upon the phraseology. The 
object f or the sense in its perception is phenomenon as quality 
solely ; the object for the reason is the thing itself as cau- 
sality for its qualities : and certainly consciousness may very 
well testify for its immediate perception of the former, and 
reason very well deny an immediate perception of the latter, 
without any contradiction between them. We are thus 
able to utterly overthrow universal skepticism, by being 
made competent, through the conclusions of Rational Psy- 
chology, to expose the sophism on which it had been built. 

We have thus a valid being of the inner spiritual Intel- 
lect against Materialism ; and a valid being of the external 
material World against Idealism ; and a complete subversion 
of that Universal Skepticism which denied that we might 
know either of them. 

We may also very well show how impossible it must be 
to attain to any such demonstration, or effect any such over- 
throw of all skepticism relative to our knowledge in percep- 
tion, by taking the position of Reid. This is available only 
as a defense, not at all as a point of aggression against any 
skepticism ; and it defends itself only in the dogmatism of 
an assumption. The argument from common sense was sim- 
ply the conviction of consciousness which Hume alleged 



VALID BEING OF THE X T I X A L . 385 

was contradicted by reason. While Reid affirmed that com- 
mon sense was wiser and safer than all the conclusions of 
reason, Hume could still allege his proofs that reason flatly 
contradicted common sense notwithstanding. Hume could 
not thus be cured of his universal skepticism, nor so far as 
his philosophy could avail could Reid prevent himself from 
being dragged down into the same abyss, and only saved 
himself by prudently holding on to consciousness or com- 
mon sense, and let philosophical reasoning go where it 
would. And the same also is true in relation to the other 
forms of skepticism ; it is not possible from mere counter- 
assumptions to do any thing effectual to extirpate them. 
" In 1812 Sir James Mcintosh remarked to Dr. Brown, that 
Reid and Hume differed more in words than opinion." Dr. 
Brown replied — " Yes, Reid bawls out — ' we must believe 
an outer world;' and then whispers, 'but we can give no 
reason for our belief.' " " Hume cries aloud — c We can 
give no reason for such a notion;' and then whispers,. ' I 
own Ave can not get rid of it.' " — Progress of Ethical 
Philosophy, p. 239. 

The conclusion from all the above is unavoidable, that 
no subjective action of a veritable understanding can possi- 
bly give the conditions for determining a nature of things 
objectively to its places in space and its periods in time. 
Even if an understanding could create its own world of phe- 
nomenal qualities and events, it could not determine their 
places and periods in one immensity of space and eternity 
of time, if it did not also make them to inhere in their sub- 
stances, depend upon their sources, adhere through their 
causes, and cohere by their reciprocities. And if it did this 
for itself, it could not determine one common space and 

17 



386 APPENDIX TO THE UNDERSTANDING. 

time for all, except as the substances and causes were objec- 
tive realities. A nature of things in determined space and 
time must have its inherent laws of connection, and such 
laws can no more relax the constancy and stringency of their 
control, than space may break up its own immensity or time 
may sunder its own perpetuity. The nature of things as 
they exist is thus demonstrably an intelligible Universal Sys- 
tem. USTot an accumulation of atoms but a connection of 
things; not a sequence of appearances but a conditioned 
series of events ; not a coincidence of facts but a universal 
communion of interacting forces. Nor is such a conclusion 
merely assumed ; nor the credulity induced by habitual ex- 
perience ; nor the revelation of an instinctive prophecy ; but 
it is a demonstration from an a priori Idea and an actual 
Law which logically and legitimately excludes all skepti- 
cism. 



PART III. 

THE REASON. 



THE FUNCTION AND PKOVINCE OF THE REASON. 

In the determination of the accordance of Idea and Law 
in both the Sense and the Understanding, we have already- 
done what the Sense and the Understanding alone by them- 
selves could never accomplish. The Sense by distinguish- 
ing and conjoining can give distinct and definite phenomena, 
but the Sense has no interest nor capacity to look over its 
own agency, or look into its own function, and find that 
which is a priori conditional for its own operations, and 
thereby explain its own perceptions. And so also the Un- 
derstanding by connecting the phenomena into things and 
events can give an ordered experience in one common space 
and one common time, but the Understanding has neither 
interest nor capacity for rising above its connecting opera- 
tions and finding that which is necessarily conditional for all 
processes of thinking, and thereby explaining its own judg- 
ments. The Sense is satisfied in perceiving, and the Under- 
standing satisfied in judging, and neither of them can phi- 
losophize about perceiving and judging, and what we have 
already done in determining both the sense and the under- 



388 THE EEASON. 

standing has been in the nse - of a function quite other and 
higher than either. 

The diverse points and instants were no sense-phenom- 
ena, and can not themselves he perceived, but were neces- 
sary conditions for all perceiving ; and thus the primitive 
intuition of space and time were wholly attained by the 
reason. And so also the space-filling and time-abiding 
forces were no phenomena for the sense, nor any judgments 
connected by the understanding, but were necessary condi- 
tions for all connections of phenomena in judgments ; and 
thus the pure notion as substance and cause has also been 
wholly attained by the reason. By its insight only was it 
made known that without the points and instants, phenom- 
ena could have neither place nor period,, and without the 
substantial and causal forces, the phenomena could never be 
determined to an experience in one common space and one 
common time. A higher function has all along been in ex- 
ercise, and we have come to an exposition philosophically 
of both the sense and the understanding by the insight and 
oversight of this superior function. 

In the Sense we perceive ; in the Understanding we 
judge ; but in the Reason we overlook the whole process of 
both. The one intellect envisages in the sense, substantiates 
m the understanding, and supervises in the reason. The 
same intellect as sense distinguishes quality and conjoins 
quantity; as understanding connects phenomena; and as 
reason comprehends all forms of knowing. 

Since, then, the sense and tho understanding have had 
no interest in the work of comprehending their own pro- 
cesses and no capability for effecting it, more manifest is it, 
that it must now be from the interest and capacity of the 



PE0VINCE OF THE REASON. 389 

reason alone that we shall come to any comprehension of its 
own processes of knowing. The animal has sense and per- 
ceives, and has also understanding that judges of the rela- 
tions of what is perceived, but it is only as the man is ra- 
tional that he can subject both his perceiving and judging 
to an a priori determination. The animal may be said 
merely to know, but the man goes beyond, and knows his 
very processes of knowing. It becomes, thus, the last want 
of science in its highest exercise to thoroughly examine this 
function of the reason and comprehend its own processes of 
comprehending. 

The difficulty of this last investigation appears promi- 
nently in this, that it can not be in the use of a higher func- 
tion subjecting a lower to its examination, for it is the high- 
est of all functions for knowing that we are now engaged in 
considering, and there can be no other method than a pro- 
cess of self-knowledge ; the reason must examine and deter- 
mine its own processes in the exercise of its own insight. 
Here is the grand yv&6i oeavrbv of the ancient philosophers, 
the most difficult attainment of all science, and comprehen- 
sive itself of all philosophy. No intuitions in space and 
time can here help us, for that which we seek can have no 
construction in figure or period ; and just as little can any 
connections of discursive thought help us, for that which 
we seek can never be connected in the notions of substance 
and cause. That which we would here know must be 
wholly supersensible and supernatural. The overseer of 
nature can not be shut up within nature. We seek that 
which encompasses nature, and which can not be any media 
of connection within nature. 

It demands careful notice how impossible it must ever 



390 THE REASON. 

be to enter the province and fulfill the function of an all- 
comprehending reason by any processes of discursive think- 
ing. It is no more preposterous to set the sense to thinking 
and judging, than it is to set the understanding to oversee- 
ing and comprehending. Geometry may as well be made 
dynamical and invade the province of natural philosophy, as 
to make natural philosophy transcend nature and explore 
the region of the supernatural. The intuitions of sense- 
constructions have their proper field for a pure science ; the 
nnderstanding-discursions have also their proper field and 
philosophy ; and the insight of the reason must have its 
own field and peculiar science above them all. And yet so 
constant, and determined, and almost incorrigible, has been 
the attempt to enter the province of the reason through 
some processes of the discursive understanding, that it be- 
comes an interest on the behalf of all rational science thor- 
oughly to expose the absurdity and helplessness of all possi- 
ble efforts in this direction. The prison of nature is the des- 
tined dwelling of the discursive understanding, and if the 
human intellect has no higher processes of knowing, then 
verily will these prison-doors never open on any thing be- 
yond. All that an understanding wants, is to think the 
connections in a nature of things, with no hinderances, and 
be permitted to push her pathway from condition to condi- 
tioned interminably. But how thus make a leap from the 
fleeting phenomena, which perpetually alternate in births 
and deaths, to a world of immortality ? How escape from 
the linked necessities in this iron chain to know the free 
originations of the Being who acts in His own liberty? How 
rise from the interminably dependent to an absolutely inde- 
pendent Author and Governor ? 



PROVINCE OF THE REASON. 391 

The process may begin in subjective thought, and the 
postulate may be some law of thought as a regulative-con- 
ception, or an identification of subject and object, or an 
abstraction which annihilates all distinctions of being and 
naught, but in all cases the thinking must proceed in an 
interminable series of fixed conditions, with no interest in 
nor aim toward, any ultimate consummation. It may be 
termed a development of the absolute thought, but in that 
direction the development can have no completion, and the 
perfected Deity is found only at the fulfillment of the inter- 
minable logical evolution ; or it may essay to turn itself back 
upon its own footsteps and retrace its way to some uncondi- 
tioned landing-stair, and at some highest generalization or 
abstraction assume that it has reached that supernatural, 
but on this assumed highest standing-point there is no relief 
to the demand for an ab extra conditioning, and the under- 
standing must still hopelessly peer into the open void and 
anxiously stretch one foot forward in vacuity. The highest 
condition and the last conditioned are still nature only, and 
the living movement that has gone from one to the other can 
at the most be called the world-spirit, which has thought out 
the whole process and been the same in every stage, and not 
at all the world-creator, who was before the world was made 
and has been above it and Lord of it through all its onward 
changes. 

Or the attempt may be made to reach the supernatural 
by beginning in objective nature. Here the understanding 
can move from one phenomenal event to another only through 
their substances and causes. The speculation must, there- 
fore, run an endless race, for if it stop any where up or down 
the series, it must bring its first phenomenon from, or lose 



392 THE REASON. 

its last in, an utter void. Should it assume to have run all 
back to an original absolute substance out of which all phe- 
nomena have come, this absolute substance, so called, would 
be only nature still, standing as the germ of the universe 
with its rudiments conditioned already in the order of their 
necessary evolution. Should it trace all to a first cause, it 
could find nothing in this assumed first cause but an efficiency 
already conditioned and which must produce the events in 
just such an ordered series, and could thus be merely the 
inner power which works out the world of nature. If it 
assume this cause as so producing the universe that the uni- 
verse does not as much condition it in its reactions as it does 
the universe, then is there the sundering of the first cause 
from nature and a chasm is made over which it is impossible 
that any thought of an understanding should be able to 
pass. But if it allows the conditions to so go down into 
nature that they may be followed up from nature and reach 
back within the causation itself, this could be no supernatural 
divinity, but nature still running up her linked regressus 
into the bosom of the Deity. The very conception of a sub- 
stance is that of a space-filling force which must affect the 
sense and give out its phenomena in a determined maimer, 
and if it be modified by other substantial forces as cause, it 
must make its changes in a determined order. The intrinsic 
being of substances and causes, as used by an understanding, 
must make their qualities and passing events unavoidable 
and without alternatives. Substance and cause are essen- 
tially nature, and can never reach the being of the super- 
natural. 

The search for the supernatural is just as endless and 
empty when we attempt the attainment through the indica- 



PROVINCE OF THE REASON. 393 

tions of adaptedness to ends. Nature gives many indica- 
tions of design, and design must have a designer. The con- 
dition must be adequate to the conditioning, and as the fact 
is more than causation, even adapting causation, so such 
adapting cause must have had an intelligent source. We 
attempt to find such intelligent source by a process of thought 
in the understanding. We seize upon an assumed designer 
as condition for the produced design, and we find this itself 
adapted to produce just such results. The adaptation is 
just as manifest here as in its own product, and is a condi- 
tioned demanding for itself a previous conditioning, and 
thus a higher designer, as truly and for the same reason as 
the former adapted product. Whence the independent 
unconditioned spring for all design ? The fact that humanity 
asks this is proof that humanity has that which can not be 
satisfied with nature, but if the discursive understanding be 
set to find it, its highest adapting cause will to it be neces- 
sarily an adapted product, and from its law of thinking the 
chase must be still onward. We may assume that there is, 
somewhere, an underived designer, because the interest of 
this higher demand in humanity can not else be quieted, but 
in the use of the understanding only we are forced to rest 
in the mere assumption, and make the want the only ground 
for assuming the being, while the intellect can never attain 
to such being nor make its conception any thing other than 
an intrinsic absurdity. An endless series may be claimed as 
an absurdity, but on the opposite side, to the understanding 
there is the impossibility and absurdity of taking any adapt- 
ing cause which is not in itself an index of its having already 
been adapted. 

In subjective thought, we may thus run the race of spec- 
17* 



394 THE REASON. 

ulative Idealism; in objective nature, we may follow the 
track of philosophical Materialism ; and in an assumed 
Teleology, we may flee from absurdities up the stream of 
adapting causes which have no source ; but the fixed con- 
nections of a discursive understanding necessarily exclude it 
forever from the land of promise. The Canaan of the super- 
natural can not so be entered. The empty abstraction is 
but the thinking an ideal Deity into nature ; the false gener- 
alization is but the crowding of nature back into Deity. 
Reason presses all her interest for deliverance, but no tor- 
tured energies of an understanding can give any relief. 

The conception and use of the speculative reason as 
given by Kant can not at all help us. It differs wholly 
from the reason as given by Plato, and which only is the 
true function we at all need for the attainment of the super- 
natural. The former finds in humanity this irrepressible 
want for an unconditioned cause and an unadapted designer, 
which may truly be first cause and independent intelligence, 
and instead of recognizing it as a demand originating in the 
insight of the reason and which only the functions of the 
reason can satisfy, he makes it to be a constitutional form or 
a priori conception in the human mind regulative of the 
process towards its attainment, and then pushes on the pro- 
cess from the conditioned to the conditioner as if at last the 
unconditioned supernatural might be attained. This is 
shown to be a vain and hopeless effort, inasmuch as it 
involves an intrinsic antinomy in the speculative faculty 
itself. The same intellectual faculty, which demands and 
regulates the process to get, is obliged to convict itself of an 
utter helplessness to attain. But it has been really the rea- 
son demanding the supernatural, and the discursive faculty 



PROVINCE OF THE REASON. 395 

of the understanding sent on to find it. The antinomy 
arises from the mistake of employing the connecting under- 
standing to work out the problems of the comprehending 
reason. "When the reason as function is set to work in the 
light and under the direction of its own insight, no antinomy 
arises and the supernatural is fairly and intelligibly attained. 
The common consciousness is the light in which we see 
all phenomena, and the common discursive thinking is the 
process by which we judge all phenomena to be connected 
in one nature, but a higher light and a broader process is 
necessary that we may comprehend nature in a clearly ascer- 
tained supernatural Author and Governor. To distinguish 
this insight of the reason, and express our conviction of its 
difference from all lower forms of knowing, we say of its 
objects that we have them in our " mind's eye." The painter 
or sculptor has his perfect archetype after which he works, 
and which is comprehensive of all he hopes to express on 
his canvas or in his block of marble, but as a creation of 
the reason, it is only in the " mind's eye" that the ideal 
stands before him. So, it has been by no perception of 
sense that we have determined the phenomena to one com- 
mon space and one common time, or that we have found the 
space-filling and time-abiding force to be necessary to a com- 
mon experience of nature ; all this has been from the insight 
of the reason, and the process has been determined solely 
under the direction of the "mind's eye," and when we now 
come to the attainment of the supernatural compass for 
comprehending all of nature and experience, the common 
consciousness and the common logical discursions can do us 
no service, but we must direct our way by the " mind's eye" 
only. And yet, as the light in which we have examined 



396 THE REASON. 

and expounded both the perceiving and judging has led us 
to results more convincingly valid than all perceiving and 
judging could themselves attain, so we may rest assured 
will the light of reason as convincingly bring us to the 
knowledge of a validly existing supernatural domain. 

A synthesis, as something added to nature which is 
above nature, and not an analysis, as something taken from 
nature which is already in nature, is what we here need. 
The God of nature must be known as independent of na- 
ture, and added in the judgment that He is nature's Creator. 
In the mind's eye, the primitive intuition gave occasion for 
immediately beholding how phenomena must be constructed, 
and the substantial and causal forces gave also in the 
mind's eye the occasion for rationally demonstrating how 
alone experience could be connected in one space and one 
time ; so now, the mind's eye must as clearly apprehend the 
supernatural spirit m order to any demonstration, how 
alone universal nature can be comprehended in an author as 
its beginning, and a finisher as its consummating. In this 
only can we possess the compass for comprehending how 
nature, and nature's one space and one time, can begin and 
end. In this necessary process of comprehending nature 
by the supernatural, we shall attain the true function of the 
reason in its subjective Idea. We must afterwards find act- 
ual facts in colligation by a Law, which is the exact correla- 
tive of this Idea, and in this we shall have a completed 
science of Rational Psychology. An ontological demonstra- 
tion of the being of God, of the soul, and a world of im- 
mortality, may then fairly follow. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE REASON IN ITS SUBJECTIVE IDEA. 



SECTION I. 

THE ATTAINMENT OF THE ABSOLUTE AS AN A PKIORI 
POSITION FOR THE REASON. 

WnEN we trace backward the work of the understand- 
ing in connecting phenomena into a system of universal 
nature, we find every event to be conditioned to an antece- 
dent, and inasmuch as the series in nature could be given in 
a discursive judgment only through the connections of the 
understanding, so in our regressns we can only retrace the 
very pathway of antecedents and consequents which the 
operation of the understanding has previously cast up in its 
connecting agency. It were in vain, therefore, to attempt 
any regressns in the pathway of nature's development ex- 
cept as we must step from the conditioned up to the condi- 
tion perpetually. The function of the understanding is 
wholly employed in the work of concluding in discursive 
judgments, and in reference to phenomena it can do nothing 
but connect them into a nature of things through their ap- 
propriate notions, and, thus, were there no other and higher 
function in exercise, we should never find any higher want 
than that there should be given an unhindered development 



398 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

to nature in the connection of cause and event, and an un- 
obstructed passage to the march of thought down the series 
in an indefinite progressus or a reflex returning up the series 
in an unbroken regressus. The understanding finds no dis- 
quiet from its confinement within the conditions of nature, 
for its endowment of function capacitates it for moving only 
within the fixed series of nature, and it can possess no inter- 
est beyond it. Our intuitions would as soon seek to over- 
leap and circumscribe space and time, as would our discur- 
sions to go beyond and comprehend nature. 

But that there are the functions of a higher faculty in 
action is quite manifest, not only from our past philosophiz- 
ing on the sense and the understanding, but also from the 
earnest inquiry spontaneously and perpetually coming up — 
Whence is nature f and whither does it tend f There are 
the stragglings of a faculty within whose interest it is to 
overleap nature, and which may never be made contented 
by running up and down the linked series in the conditions 
of nature. Discursive thinking up to the highest generali- 
zation and down to the lowest analysis can not satisfy. No 
possible conclusion in a discursive judgment, whether in the 
abstract or the concrete, can fill this craving capacity. There 
is demanded for it a position out of and above the flowing 
stream of conditioned changes, whence may be seen the un- 
conditioned source in which they have all originated, and 
the strong and steady hand that holds all suspended from it" 
self and gives to them their direction toward some ultimate 
consummation. But this interest of the higher faculty al- 
ways exceeds the capabilities of the lower to satisfy. The 
sense, in its pure operations, can only construct for itself a 
pathway by conjoining the diversity in space and time, and 



AX A PEIOEI POSITION IN THE ABSOLUTE. 399 

can, therefore, never issue out beyond the line which she 
carries onward herself and which is, limited in her own 
movement. The understanding can have foothold only as it 
may step from the conception of some phenomenon as event 
to an antecedent phenomenon in connection by its cause; 
and it may, therefore, never put down the foot beyond the 
conception of that which is an attained condition for its 
present standing, and which could be no safe stepping-stone 
were it not itself conceived to be linked to a still higher 
condition. The aspirings of this higher faculty and the ef- 
forts of the inferior to reach and satisfy it, throw the human 
mind upon a tread-mill which forces it to a perpetual but 
vain toil, compelling to a continual stepping while each stair 
must ever slide away beneath and disappoint the hope of 
any permanent landing-place. We can, in this way, find no 
link in the series which will permit that it should be taken 
in the judgment as the origin of all others, and itself unor- 
iginated from a higher ; and if we assume that there must 
be such somewhere at the head of the series, this is merely 
because the higher faculty demands some ultimate point 
upon which all are dependent, but which is only assumed to 
be and never reached, because the lower faculty can never 
attain unto it. 

An interminable dialectic is thus opened from the very 
faculties of the human mind, and all attempt to stop the 
demand in the interest of the reason, that we should some- 
how issue out of nature and find its Author and Governor, is 
in vain ; and all effort in any possible use of the functions 
of an understanding to meet this demand is equally in vain. 
The reason is too enterprising, to submit to any circumscrip- 
tion within nature ; the understanding is too limited in its 



400 THE REASON IIS" ITS IDEA. 

capacity, to be able that it should ever unbar the gate and 
point the way to the supernatural. The discursive faculty 
must ever keep within the conditions of the space and time- 
determinations, and must, therefore, ever pass through the 
connective notions of substance cause and reciprocal influ- 
ence in concluding in judgments ; and that which may not 
be brought within the conditions of such connectives must 
forever, to it, be not merely the unattainable but the utterly 
unintelligible. We are thus forced to dispense in this part 
of our work with all use of the understanding, and can see 
that if the supernatural may in any manner be attained,. it 
must be in the use of the reason only. The faculty in whose 
interest the want originates, must rely upon its own resources 
alone to attain to that which may satisfy it. It is its own 
operation for comprehending universal nature that we wish 
to attain in a complete and systematic process, and thus 
possess the entire faculty of the reason in its idea. In this 
we shall find how it is possible that a nature of things may 
be comprehended ; and according to which, if in fact this 
ever is clone, nature necessarily must be comprehended. 
The finding of such a fact must belong to the second chap- 
ter of the Reason, while here we are intent only on attain- 
ing the systematic process as idea. As preliminary to all 
progress in this work, it is first of all necessary that we 
attain our a priori position of overlooking this whole pro- 
vince, and in the light of which our whole investigation 
must be conducted. 

We make abstraction, then, utterly of all that is phe- 
nomenal, and therefore dispense with the use of all the 
functions of the sense both in the sensibility and in the con- 
structing agency. By thus making abstraction of all that 



AN A PEIOEI POSITION IN THE ABSOLUTE. 401 

is phenomenal, we dispense also with all the operation of the 
understanding, which must go from phenomenon to phenom- 
enon through the connecting notion. The phenomenal is 
gone and there is nothing to connect, and the notional as a 
connective only remains, and the functions of the under- 
standing have not the necessary conditions for their opera- 
tion. They can connect in judgments only according to the 
sense, when that may give its phenomena ; but here nothing 
of the sense remains. We have then the notional only, as 
the reason had supplied it for the use of the understanding 
in the connecting of the phenomena in the sense. We thus 
have nature in its substances, causes, and reciprocal influ- 
ences, as things in themselves, and as they must be deter- 
mined to exist by any intelligences who should know things 
directly in their essence, without any organs of sensibility 
to give to them a mode of appearance as phenomena. Hav- 
ing thus wholly done away with the phenomenal and the 
coming and departing of appearances ever varying, and 
retaining only the notional which is permanent, we do away 
with all significancy and use of the separate places in space 
and the separate periods in time which the definite phenom- 
ena severally occupied. Substance in its causality is, but no 
inhering, adhering, or cohering qualities are. The true 
ground and essential being of nature is conceived, but not 
the mode of its appearance as phenomenal world in the 
sense. 

We have already made ourselves somewhat conversant 
with this pure understanding-conception of space-filling and 
time-enduring substance, which the reason supplies for the 
understanding in order that it may determine phenomena in 
the one common space and one common time. We would 



402 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

now take it more immediately within the mind's eye, and 
endeavor to attain a clear reason-conception of what it must 
be. We have simply considered it as force, which in its 
very conception involves an antagonism, but have not at- 
tempted to attain any conception of distinguishable forces, 
and thus of distinct substances in their causality. Nor need 
we now go into any very extended disquisition on these 
topics, a very few considerations being sufficient for all pres- 
ent purposes, while a more complete examination will be 
found in the Rational Cosmolgy. 

We here need only to notice that different substances are 
forces differently modified. The living animal has a sensory 
which in its excitability to appetite is force for locomotion ; 
the living plant has no sentient nature to be awakened in an 
appetite, and has no locomotive force, yet still an appetency 
to take in and incorporate with itself that nourishment 
which lies contiguous to its own organization, and thus a 
force of assimilation for its own development ; the mineral 
gathers about a nucleus by super-position that which is 
homogeneous to itself, and thus a force of crystallization ; 
many earths have their chemical affinities, and thus a force 
of cohesion ; and fluids and gases their affinities which give 
a force of combination ; magnetism, electricity, and galvan- 
ism have their transmissions of influence through counter- 
currents and thus a bi-polar force, and gravity has every 
where an antagonism in its attraction and repulsion ; while 
light and heat are diremptive forces that push from a center 
and are necessarily imponderable. And here, let it be noted, 
that the higher force is always superinduced upon the lower 
forces and adapts itself to them, perhaps modifying but not 
destroying them. The higher holds all the lower in com- 



AN A PRIORI POSITION IN THE ABSOLUTE. 403 

bination and subserviency to its own ends, but can neither 
exclude nor annihilate them. The force of animal life holds 
also that of assimilation in vegetable life ; and vegetable life 
has the forces of crystallization, chemical cohesion, the bi- 
polar forces, and gravitation, all retained in subservient com- 
bination ; and so the crystal has its chemical bi-polar and 
gravitating forces, while the crystallizing force overrules all 
the others and holds them subordinate to its own end. We 
shall not here attempt to trace the a priori law through all 
these distinguishable forces. Past a doubt such a law 
exists, and determines how each distinguishable substance 
must he / and determining how the substance in its causal- 
ity must be will determine also how its modes of phenom- 
enal manifestation in the sense must be, and thus what quali- 
ties and events must appear. But we are not here at all 
concerned with the tracing of nature in its substance down- 
ward, as it must develop itself in an experience in the sense ; 
and only concerned in retracing its conception upward to a 
supernatural Author. 

We will then, having made abstraction of the phenom- 
enal, now make an abstraction of all the superimpose^ dis- 
tinguishable forces, and retain only the most simple and 
that which is primary and present in all, viz., the force of 
gravity. In this we retain all that is essential to a space- 
filling and time-enduring force, and thus all that is essential 
in the notion of substance with its causality. Let there be 
the reason-conception of an everywhere antagonistic force, 
and we shall in this have substance with its causal laws of 
attraction, repulsion, inertia, impenetrability, motion by im- 
pulse, etc. ; and thus, as it were, the frame- work or elemen- 
tary rudiments of a nature of things, without regarding 



404 THE REASON IX ITS IDEA. 

whatever other distinguishable forces and thus different sub- 
stances and causes may be superinduced upon this. What- 
ever may be thus superinduced, we may know that it can 
not exclude or extinguish this force of gravity. This must 
surely be as extensive as nature ; for it is the primal force 
upon which all other superinduced forces must rest, and by 
which they must all be conditioned. We have in this all 
that is necessary for an d priori representation of a univer- 
sal nature of things in itself, and not in phenomenal ap- 
pearance. 

We may, then, take any point in this primary space- 
filling force, and if it is not itself a center, it will be tend- 
ing to some center of gravity. When we approach that 
center of gravity, if it is not itself an ultimate central point, 
that point with all the sphere which turns upon it will be 
tending to some further point, and thus we might move on- 
ward through Avorlds and systems indefinitely. Can the 
reason take its stand upon some central point, toward which 
the universe of matter shall gravitate, and find an author 
and primal originating source for it, without needing any 
higher point of antagonism ? Such ultimate point we now 
assume in conception, and the task of the reason is, to show 
how it is possible that that point, and thus all the universal 
sphere that tends toward it, may be originated and sustained. 
In the comprehension of that one central point of all antag- 
onism we comprehend the universe of nature. And, here, 
to prepare the way for attaining that pure ideal which must 
be the compass for reason's comprehension of nature, it is 
quite important that we attain to a clear reason-conception 
of this central force upon which universal nature must 
repose. 



AN A PRIORI POSITION IN THE ABSOLUTE. 405 

Conceive of two congealed pencils, such that when their 
points are pressed together the pressure shall equally liquefy 
both, and then will the liquefaction accumulate itself about 
the point of contact, and if no disturbing force intervene 
the fluid will perfectly ensphere itself about that point, en- 
larging as the pressure continues, and the liquefaction accu- 
mulates. The rigid pencils would equilibrate the pressure 
by an opposite unyielding resistance, and though there 
would be force at the point of contact, it would all be re- 
tained in that point, and there could be no accumulation. 
The liquefaction at the point permits a perpetual coming in 
and going off from the point, and in the continued pressure 
a continual coming in and going off, and thus a continual 
accumulation. This must ensphere itself about the point, 
for the protrusion from the point must constantly be equal- 
izing itself in all directions, as the antagonisms push each 
liquefied pencil back from the point of contact and out upon 
itself. If now we will abstract the phenomenal, and only 
retain in the mind's eye that which is the space-filling thing 
in itself, we shall have the pure notion of force as a space- 
filling substance. The substantial being is the force, and 
the phenomenal is the mode in which this space-filling force 
gives its appearance through the sense. In our supposition 
above, for illustration, we have assumed pencils as sense- 
phenomena, but that purpose being answered, we would 
now retain the pencil-points in contact only in the mind's 
eye, as two pure activities in counter-action, and themselves 
doing what the liquid pencils indicated that the pressure 
was doing with the fluid, viz., ensphering itself about the 
point of counter-agency. We would make the mind's eye 



406 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

follow the force, and not now use the bodily eye that fol- 
lowed the phenomenon which the force determined. 

The antagonist activities in the point of contact must 
have each a perpetually augmenting energy springing from 
its own source, and this will secure that each must press the 
other out and back upon itself as the augmenting energy ' 
comes in, and thus determine a perpetual generation of force 
at the point, and distribution of it equally all around the 
primal central position. Each antagonism as crowded back 
becomes an energy still pushing toward the center, and this 
equalizes itself all around the center, and all points out of 
the center perpetually react upon the center as the gener- 
ating forces accumulate about it, and thus this central force 
must have more reaction upon it as the sphere enlarges, and 
when the sphere has so enlarged as in its reactions upon the 
center to equilibrate the generating force at the center, the 
generation of forces can proceed no further, and the sphere 
ceases to grow. An infinite agency at the center can aug- 
ment the sphere indefinitely, at pleasure. So a primal 
space-filling force as a veritable substance may be. Other 
distinguishable forces may be superinduced upon this, and 
we may have cohesive, crystalline, vegetable, and animal 
bodies as distinctive substances, but whether filling a few 
feet of space, or the place of revolving worlds and systems, 
they will all alike gravitate toward, and be controlled by 
this central power. 

With a clear conception of such force and this kept be- 
fore the mind's eye, as truly space-filling substance, we can 
readily determine a priori many things which material sub- 
stance must phenomenally manifest through the sense, and 
follow out the physical causation which will in these forces 



AN A PRIORI POSITION IN THE ABSOLUTE. 407 

be everywhere working through universal nature. The ma- 
terial universe must be spherical ; must have its peripheral 
limit ; must have its poles in the line of the antagonism 
working at the center ; must have repulsion from the center 
as the cube of the radius of the sphere, and must have re- 
action toward the center in each radius, and which will be 
attraction at the center, as the square of the radius ; and as 
both the attraction and repulsion regularly diminish from 
the center, they must both be as the quantity of outgoing 
and reacting forces, and ever in the ratio, the repulsion as 
spherically self-balanced, inversely as the cube of the dis- 
tance, and the attraction as circularly self-balanced, inversely 
as the square of the distance ; with many other cosmical 
principles that in Rational Cosmology has already been 
determined and correctly stated. But it is the interest of 
reason here, to follow out this inherent cognition of sub- 
stance and cause in the opposite direction ; not to trace the 
forces as they work down into nature, and work out an in- 
telligible and orderly cosmos, but as they may lead upward 
to the cognition of the supernatural. The antagonist agen- 
cies generate force and are determining conditions for all the 
development of nature downward, but in their single and 
separate energizing they have neither substance nor phe- 
nomenon above. The central force can sustain and give 
control to the universe and become to all the physical causes 
and changes of the universe that which can be traced to no 
higher physical condition. All force and change originate 
and propagate themselves 7 from hence, and there is no higher 
point of force, or possibility of phenomenal manifestations. 
The single energies are not physical force, and can impress 
themselves upon no material organs, that they may give 



408 THE SEASON IN ITS IDEA. 

content for any phenomena. They belong wholly to the 
spiritual and not to the material world. 

But it is a fair and for the reason a necessary inquiry, 
whence these energies that constitute in their antagonism 
the space-filling forces ? In what source may we find these 
acts which counteract to become indentified? All force, 
and thus all of material nature is a compound and has at 
least a duality / in what may we find a primordial and indi- 
visible un ity ? Nature fills place in its own space and 
period in its own time, and space and time as common for 
all can only be determined in the one common nature ; where 
shall we find the grand source and terminus out of which, 
and into which, both nature and nature's space and time 
may come and depart together? How shall we find and 
know Him to whom the conditions of nature, and of nature's 
space and time are utterly impertinent and unmeaning ? All 
these and more such queries the reason must ever be pro- 
pounding, and when nature lies before us only in the vague 
apprehension commonly taken of material substance and 
physical cause, it were vain and presumptuous to attempt any 
answer. There is nothing that gives traces of wisdom and 
rational principle in the dry and dead matter, and thus no 
foot-prints of the Maker to lead us out to His dwelling- 
place, nor any marks to tell us how He made the world or 
indicate how He manages its movements. But with our 
clear conception of forces as substantial and dynamical, 
nature has already in her intrinsic being the lines that lead 
downward in cosmical order and beauty not only, but also 
lines which lead upward to a wholly supernatural Creator 
and Governor. The tracing of such lines upward may be as 
reverent as the tracing of them downward may be patient 



AN A PRIORI POSITION IN THE ABSOLUTE. 409 

and -careful, and the results may be as sure for the superna- 
tural as for the natural. Nature exists in substantial, im- 
penetrable, space-filling forces, and reposes on the grand 
central counteragency ; whence comes this central counter- 
working of simple spiritual activities ? If they work on 
abidingly, the universe is steadfast ; if they cease their ener- 
gizing, the universe at once collapses. Withdraw the cen- 
tral activities, and nature is at once extinguished; who 
originates and perpetuates this central working ? 

In some way the reason must come to the cognition of a 
source in its simplicity, that may at pleasure energize in the 
single acts that counterwork and constitute the central force, 
and which through this central force may generate and dis- 
tribute the substantial forces which constitute the material 
universe. In this source must be a directing intelligence 
that conditions all things, and which conditioning must orig- 
inate here with no higher author. Substance in its emcient 
causality is ground and source for all phenomena, but this 
intelligent agent must in His own simplicity be the Creator 
of the force that constitutes universal nature, and must put 
it out in the void which from its presence only is a void no 
longer. The Creator must stand absolved from all condi- 
tions that can arise ab extra to Himself, even from any inter- 
nal antagonism and force which, as action and reaction, 
would demand that He be a composite being. His only con- 
ditions must be such as are self-imposed in the dignity of 
His own transcendental unity. It is not, thus, an uncondi- 
tioned which is given in abstraction — merely cutting off all 
occasion for changes and successions above, and assuming a 
source and cause for all below — this the space-filling force 
and substance of nature itself is. It must be a positive and 

18 



410 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

intelligently affirmed unconditioned, whose only end of 
action is found by Himself in His own being. Such alone 
can stand above nature, and condition nature, without the 
reciprocity of a conditioning back upon Himself from nature. 
As thus positively unconditioned, we give to this concep- 
tion of a supernatural being the high name, which must be 
His own prerogative and incommunicable possession — the 
Absolute. Not absolved from the claims of His own excel- 
lency and dignity, for such absolute could be no personal 
God, but wholly absolved from all ab extra relations and 
conditions. He is a law to Himself and thus His action 
always self-determined, but nothing out of Himself imposes 
any law upon Him. The absolute in the meaning of infinite 
space, or unconditioned cause would be no help in compre- 
hending the universe ; our only compass must be the Being 
who self-controlled, stands absolved from all other controll- 
ing. 

The whole problem of the reason, therefore, is seen to 
be in this determination of the absolute. Nature can be 
comprehended by the reason in no other possible manner than as 
encompassed in the being of such an absolute ; and the 
determination of this, is the determination of the possibility 
of an operation of comprehension. In the pure ideal of 
the absolute we are to find our a priori position for over- 
looking nature, and thereby determining how its comprehen- 
sion is possible ; and in this we shall have the entire func- 
tion of a comprehending faculty, higher than that of the 
sense which only conjoins, and higher also than the under- 
standing which only connects, even the faculty of the rea- 
son which comprehends all that may be conjoined or con- 
nected. Such will be the function of the Reason in its Idea. 



AN A PEIOEI POSITION IN THE ABSOLUTE. 411 

It is quite important here to carry along with us, in this 
part of our work, the abiding conviction that we have passed 
completely out of the domain of the sense and of that of the 
understanding also. It will be wholly perposterous — when 
we have made abstraction of all that is phenomenal, and 
transcended all that the operations of conjunction and of 
connection have produced, and have taken upon us the task 
of an d priori examination of the comprehending faculty — if 
we shall any where unawares permit that there be a sliding 
away from this pure province of the supernatural, and we 
be found dealing again with the conceptions which are con- 
ditioned to nature and the modes of space and time. The 
absolute is not nature and possesses nothing in common with 
nature, and may neither be constructed in place and period 
nor connected in substance cause and reciprocal influence. 
The entire phenomenal and notional of nature is so wholly 
out of and beneath the absolute, that although originating 
in and depending upon the absolute, yet may it never be 
conceived as reacting and thereby throwing back any condi- 
tions upon the absolute. We may have nothing to do with 
any conditions here reaching back from nature, and putting 
us again to our old work of discursive connections. 



SECTION II. 

THE DETERMINATION OP PERSONALITY TO THE ABSOLUTE. 

The reason-conception of the absolute, which the reason 
gives to itself, is above the notional ; as the understanding- 
conception of the notion, which the reason gave to the 



412 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

understanding, is above the phenomenal. To distinguish this 
pure reason-conception from the pure understanding-concep- 
tion of the Notion, we here give to it a distinctive name and 
call it the Ideal. This ideal of the absolute is to be the 
compass for comprehending nature, as the notional was the 
medium for connecting phenomena in a nature of things. In 
this we are to determine how it may be known, as a syn- 
thetical proposition, that nature must have its author ; as in 
that it was determined how it might be demonstrated, that 
phenomena must be inherent in substance, adherent in cause, 
and coherent in reciprocal influence. The phenomena were 
in distinct and definite places and periods, and could not be 
determined in one whole of space and of time, except 
through the media of such notions as gave universality to 
all places in one whole of space and all periods in one whole 
of time. In this manner the phenomena in the sense and 
the things and events in the understanding came very well 
to be united, and the passage from the sense to the under- 
standing was effected, and the synthetical propositions — all 
qualities must have substance ; all events must have cause ; 
all concomitant events must have reciprocity of influence — 
came to be readily demonstrated, when without such a 
priori demonstration they could only be used as assump- 
tions. And now the same result of an a priori demonstra- 
tion of a synthetical proposition is to be determined, but 
with this difference, the conceptions of the phenomena and 
the things were, the one in the sense and the other in the 
understanding ; while here, the conceptions of a nature of 
things and of an author of nature are, the one in the under- 
standing and the other in the reason. The passage from 
the sense to the understanding and from the understanding 



ELEMENTS OF COMPREHENSION. 413 

to the reason both demand a synthesis, and can neither pos- 
sibly be effected by any analyses descending nor any general- 
izations ascending ; and as we have found the passage for 
the first in the notional, so now we are to find the passage 
for the second in this pure ideal. 

And yet still further, as we found the very essence of 
substance in its causality to be a space-filling and time-endur- 
ing force, and that as counter-agency it filled its place in 
space from a permanent center and might thus determine all 
places in its own space, and also as enduring center it might 
thus determine all periods in its own time ; so now we must 
find the very essence of the absolute to be a spaceless and 
timeless personality, who, as above all the modes of expan- 
sion in space and duration in time, may be not nature but 
supernatural; not thing but person. If conditioned to the 
one whole of nature, of space, and of time, then it must be 
of the substance and causality of nature, and can never be 
the Divinity above nature. No matter whether all of the 
phenomenal be abstracted from it or not ; in naked substance 
and cause it is but pure force, space- occupying and time- 
abiding, and must react upon nature and nature upon it, and 
the compound thus effected must still be nature altogether. 
And no matter whether it be carried above all phenomena ; 
it is then pure force in its antagonism at the center, and as 
undeveloped must yet go out in development, and such is 
only nature in its rudimental germ, and not at all nature's 
author and God. Except as we determine the absolute to 
be personality wholly out of and beyond all thfe conditions 
and modes of space and time, we can by no possibility leave 
nature for the supernatural. The clear-sighted and honest 
intellect, resting in this conclusion that the conditions of 



414 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

space and time can not be transcended, will be Atheistic j 
while the deluded intellect, which has put the false play of 
the discursive' understanding in its abstract speculations for 
the decisions of an all-embracing reason, and deems itself so 
fortunate as to have found a deity within the modes of space 
and time, will be Pantheistic. The Pantheism will be ideal 
and transcendent, when it reaches its conclusions by a logi- 
cal process in the abstract law of thought ; and it will be 
material and empiric when it concludes from the fixed con- 
nections of cause and effect in the generalized law of nature ; 
but in neither case is the Pantheism any other than Atheism, 
for the Deity, circumscribed in the conditions of space and 
time with nature, is but nature still, and whether in abstract 
thought or generalized reality, is no God. It becomes Pan- 
cosmism rather than Pantheism. 

This determination of personality to the absolute, and 
which takes it out from all the modes of space and time, is 
the only possible way in which it may be demonstrated how 
nature may have an author, which author shall not be nature 
still and yet demanding for itself an author. In such a pure 
ideal as the absolute in its personality, a compass is given by 
which the reason may comprehend nature, and the completed 
process of comprehension thus effected is a faculty of the 
reason in idea. This, therefore, is a necessary, and our next 
work, to determine personality to the absolute. This will 
give all the necessary elements in the work of comprehen- 
sion. We termed unity, plurality, and totality the primitive 
Elements in the operation of Conjunction ; and also sub- 
stance and accidence in space, or, as the same thing, source 
and event in time, and cause and effect, and action and re- 
action, the primitive Elements in the operation of Connec- 



ELEMENTS OF COM PREHENSION. 415 

tion ; we will now term these when found, the primitive 
Elements in the operation of Comprehension. 

It will result here, as in each of the former operations, 
that the primitive elements will be three in number ; and 
also as in each former case, that the first and second elements 
will stand to each other in an antithesis, while the third will 
be the synthesis or point of indifference between the first 
two. 

1. Antagonism, by which is meant the point in which 
two agencies meet and counter-work, determines position in 
space. The accumulated and ensphered force determines place 
in space ; and, as fixed in its center, the entire sphere occu- 
pies perpetually the same place in space. From this space- 
filling substance in its permanence the one whole of space 
is determined, inasmuch as its permanent place gives a datum 
for determining direction and distance from its center to all 
the places in space which it occupies. But if we were to 
conceive of its extinction, though it were impossible to con- 
ceive that space itself were extinguished, yet it would be 
wholly impossible to determine sameness of place, and thus 
impossible to determine the same wholeness of all space. 
The conception of a new antagonism would give again new 
position, and the engendered force would give again new 
definite place, and thus a determined whole of all space ; but 
whether this whole of all space were the same as the former 
whole of all space could no more be determined than whether 
the places in which the reflected moon and stars in two dif 
ferent lakes appeared were the same whole space. The first 
position and place, and thus wholeness of space, are lost to all 
determination so soon as the space-filling force is extinct, 
inasmuch as there is then nothing by which permanency of 



416 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

position and place can he indicated. It thus follows, that 
the single pure agency which can have no antagonism, can 
have nothing to which the conditions of space have any sig- 
nificancy. It can never be determined in position, place, 
nor in the sameness of any one whole space. 

So also this point of meeting in action from whence 
counter-agency takes its rise, determines instants in time. 
The successive counter-working and accumulating: of force 
and continuance of changes determines period ; and, as 
reckoned from the primal instant onward, gives a datum 
for determining all period in which the series of changes 
occur, and thus of determining the same one whole of time. 
But, were we to conceive this counter-agency to be extin- 
guished, and another antagonism with its determined instants 
and successive periods and one whole of time to be determined: 
it would be impossible to determine that the two wholes 
of time Avere the same whole of time, equally as much so 
and for the same reason as to determine whether the succes- 
sions and times inherently in two dreams were in the same 
whole time. There would be no perduring source which 
could indicate the periods of its own changes. It thus fol- 
lows, that the single pure agency which can have no antagon- 
ism can have no fixed instant, no definite period, and no 
determined whole of time; and thus to it none of the condi- 
tions of time can be significant. 

Moreover, in this antagonism the primal condition of a 
nature of things is determined. Its counter-agency engen- 
ders the space-filling substance in all its causality, and 
evolves the successive changes as cause and effect, all of 
which in their conditioned connections depend upon this pri- 
mal condition ; and thus all of nature is- determined in this 



ELEMENTS OF COMPREHENSION. 417 

central counter- working ; and if any other distinguishable 
forces be introduced, they must be superinduced upon this, 
for this primal force must condition all that shall come 
within it. It thus follows, that the simple pure agency 
can come within none of the conditions of a nature of 
things ; inasmuch as within itself there can never be an- 
tagonism, and thus can never give an engendered force 
which is causality and condition for all of nature, and, 
therefore, to it the notions of substance, cause, and recipro- 
cal influence are wholly impertinent and insignificant. 

This reason-conception of simple, pure activity is thus 
wholly unconditioned to space, time, and a nature of things ; 
and is a priori conditional for all transcending of nature. 
It were wholly impossible to find any passage out from na- 
ture to the supernatural, except in this reason-conception of 
a pure agency which can come within none of the conditions 
that belong to nature, and has none of the necessitated con- 
nections of a discursive judgment. But such pure activity 
is the conception of pure spontaneity / and this must stand 
as our first element of Personality. 

But this reason-conception of pure spontaneity must be 
most carefully distinguished from what sometimes takes the 
name of spontaneity in the understanding, and which be- 
longs to nature. Thus, we speak of the spontaneous pro- 
ductions of nature ; spontaneous growth ; spontaneous 
combustion, etc. Spontaneity here is negative only of ap- 
plied conditions. The earth produced its fruits without the 
application of human toil as a condition ; the combustible 
took fire without the application of a spark or flame as a 
condition. But in neither case is it a negative of all condi- 
tion and thus an exclusion of necessity. There is an inhe- 

18* 



418 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

rent causality already in possession, and in virtue of which 
the product appears. The earth is already cause fbr the 
germination of the seeds in its own bosom ; the combusti- 
ble is cause for combustion in its own fermentation ; there 
is no need for the application of any other causality than 1 
that already in possession. But this efficiency has been 
transmitted from a higher causality, and is thus truly condi- 
tioned in its antecedent. The causation has itself been 
caused, and could not have been a causa can sans had it not 
also been already a causa causata. It is wholly a discursive 
process that we here pursue, and the efficiency must be fol- 
lowed up from event to event, the subsequent always condi- 
tioned by what has already taken place in the antecedent. 
Nature possesses only conditioned causality, and though it 
may negative all applied conditions and call this spontaneity, 
yet can it never negative all communicated or transmitted 
condition and be pure spontaneity. 

There is also, sometimes, a passing up to the primal con- 
ditions, and by a negation of all antecedents an assuming of 
a spontaneous beginning in this primal condition. But such 
attains no positive reason-cognition of spontaneity, and only 
an arbitrary negation of all higher conditioning. The only 
method of a distinct cognition of this assumed spontaneity 
is, to fix the mind's eye upon a force in a point of counter- 
agency. This gives the genesis of a substance which fills 
definite place in space. The force as substance in its causal 
ity, begins to be in this antagonism ; and above this it is not 
properly substance or cause, but pure act. Causality be- 
gins in this counter- working, and develops itself in a per- 
petual unfolding of new conditioned products. Here, there- 
fore, is cause in its highest conception ; unconditioned, ex- 



ELEMENTS OF COMPREHENSION. 419 

cept in the inherent antagonism which is its own being. 
And now, this is sometimes taken to be the Unconditioned ; 
the Absolute Cause ; the Spontaneity that begets nature ; 
and that in which not only all philosophy of nature, but all 
science must terminate. It is the starting-point for thought, 
and nature must be evolved from it. It must go out in 
effects, filling space and evolving the universe from its own 
efficiency, and must ever work on in the interminable pro- 
gressus of pushing new conditioned products from the last ; 
and is thereby the author of a perpetually unfolding nature 
of things. The author of nature can no more be without 
the universe, than the universe can be without its author. 
The universe is but the perpetual unfolding of the abso- 
lute cause. 

But, in this there is no pure spontaneity. It is bound in 
its own conditions, and is under a necessity to develop itself. 
It is not nature's author as supernatural but only nature's 
germ including the rudiments of a universe, and is as much 
nature at the first as in any successive step of its develop- 
ment. Causality is ever counteraction ; and thus inherently 
conditioned action ; and is notional for the understanding, 
not pure ideal for the reason. It can possibly have no ele- 
ment of personality within it, and thus no pure spontaneity 
may be analyzed from it. The supernatural is not absolute 
cause ; this is an absurdity, inasmuch as cause is ever inhe- 
rently conditioned. 

The reason-cognition of a pure spontaneity must be 
found in the simple activity, and not in any force which is 
the product of counter-activities. The substance in its caus- 
ality originates in, and can not itself possess, a pure sponta- 
neity. The counter-working of causation must be tran- 



420 THE REASON IX ITS IDEA. 

scended, or we only mount to where nature begins, but we 
do not go over at all within the supernatural. Nature is 
connection through dynamical conditions ; the supernatural 
is uncompounded, uncounteracted self-activity. That an 
author of nature may be person independent of nature, he 
must be pure activity, neither caused by, nor conditioned to, 
any efficiency imparted or transmitted ab extra. If this 
activity stand conditioned to any thing ab extra, then does 
nature reach beyond its author; and he is comprehended 
and no compass for comprehending nature. The absolute 
must comprehend all counter-agency, and must therefore be 
pure spontaneous agency; and in this is found the first es- 
sential element, which transcends the agency that is com- 
pound and conditioned as thing, and is agency in its own 
unconditioned simplicity as person. The first Element in 
determining personality to the absolute, and thus the possi- 
bility of comprehension, is pure Spontaneity. 

•2. Pure spontaneity in itself is wholly blind and lawless. 
It can not of itself be sufficient to determine personality to 
the absolute, nor give the compass for an operation of com- 
prehension. There must be some end to which the action 
as spontaneity is directed, and such end must give the law 
to the action, and thus as antithesis to spontaneity give the 
cognition of spontaneity controlled and determined. But 
the cognition that such end is in nature, or that it is nature 
itself, will subject the spontaneity to nature, and at once 
condition the absolute in necessity. It is, only that nature 
may be. This controlling end must be other than nature, 
out of and independent of nature, or it can not possibly give 
us the a priori condition in what way nature itself must be, 
and thus comprehend nature in the eternal design and rea- 



ELEMENTS OF COMPREHENSION. 421 

son of its author. As above nature, that end which is to 
give law to the agency creative of nature must be super- 
natural. It must determine how nature is to be, while yet 
nature is not brought into being ; and must thus be control- 
ling over the spontaneity, independent of any and all condi- 
tions to which it is to direct the spontaneous agency that it 
may give them their birth. The absolute itself as author of 
nature exists alone out of nature, and is the supernatural ; 
and thus this end, controlling the creative agency as sponta- 
neity, must be in the absolute itself. This must be its own 
end, and thus also its own law ; and thereby comes out the 
reason-conception of personality in this, that the absolute is 
pure Will : he is self-active and self-directed. His end, and 
thus his law of action is not in nature ; for that would de- 
grade him at once to a means, and a thing to be used for a 
further end. He would be, only that nature as end might 
be. His end is in himself, and his law of action is self- 
imposed ; and he thus makes nature to be for his own be- 
hoof. That spontaneity may become personal activity, and 
thus a will which may behave — i. e., have possession and 
control of its own agency — it must possess an end in itself, 
and thus impose law upon itself, and thereby be autonomic. 
But such a conception of end and law in the absolute itself, 
is pure autonomy ; and this must be a second primitive 
element in personality. 

But this reason-cognition of pure autonomy is not very 
readily attained in its complete discrimination from all the 
illusions which a discursive understanding constantly ob- 
trudes upon us. It is not by any analogies with the dynam- 
ical connections in an understanding, much less any analysis 
of such conclusions in judgments, or any abstractions of 



422 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

conceptions gained in discursive processes of thinking, that 
will bring us to any right and adequate apprehension of 
what a pure will is, and in it the everlasting distinction in 
kind of all person from thing. It is not in itself probable 
that this knot in all dialectics and vexed problem in all 
ethical metaphysics — so intricate that the labor of centuries 
has been here exhausted — is so easily to find its solution, as 
by a mere change of the discursive connection from the 
conditioned series in outward nature to any conditioned 
successions in inward experience, that we are henceforth to 
have it free from all entanglement. If we keep the process 
within the discursions of the understanding, we shall have 
necessity and heteronomy ; never spontaneity in autonomy. 
We may have a sensibility awakened to appetite, but no 
such action from awakened desire can be pure will, any 
more than is the flowing stream when impelled by its own 
gravity and retained within the banks which its own action 
has constituted. The present has always its condition in a 
higher period than its own, and when it is to go forth in 
action, that action has already its law imposed upon it by 
another above and out of itself, and it can not thus become 
its own end, and arrest the whole process, and throw itself 
out of its long and deep- worn channel, and originate some 
new product of its own for which it shall be beholden solely 
in autonomy. Its perpetual flow of activity can in no way 
be discriminated from physical necessity, by any arbitrary 
terms that may be put upon it. It is important that we 
here distinctly apprehend how completely we must transcend 
the whole province within which work the functions of the 
understanding, or we can never find the compass for com- 
prehending nature. For this it is conditional that we have 



ELEMENTS OP COMPEEHENSION. 423 

a will, in which only can there be personality ; and a pure 
will is in its very conception self-action self-directed ; spon- 
taneity in autonomy. If, in any way, we put the end which 
is to condition the activity out of the absolute itself, we 
thereby bind the absolute in conditioned nature. 

This will appear in the conclusion of the following con- 
siderations. First, let it be considered that in nature noth- 
ing is for itself. Through all her series, nature now is, not 
for what it is, but for something to be. It is not itself its 
own end, nor possessing any thing which is its own end, but 
is ever an unfolding to attain something not yet consum- 
mated. No portion nor aggregate of nature can be auto- 
nomic, but is and ever must be under conditions imposed 
upon it, and thus is ever a means to an end not itself nor 
its own. It is ever more used as a thing, and can never be- 
come a user of things for its own end as person. 

But, secondly, we will rise above the phenomenal in 
nature, and thus pass from the changes which give coming 
and departing events in a perpetual series of conditions, and 
take the space-filling force at the point of its antagonism on 
which all nature reposes ; and here we may find a sort of 
autonomy, but not pure, or such as elevates from thing to 
person. This central antagonism is force ; and in its counter- 
working supplies force which enspheres itself in space, and 
thus has within itself its own law, and in its working dif- 
fuses its own law through all the sphere ; and thus the uni- 
verse is in this view under a law self-imposed. The space- 
filling force diffuses its own law through all the space filled, 
and is ever thus working on under the conditions of its own 
laws self-perpetuated. This is mechanical autonomy. The 
central force develops itself, and carries its own conditions 



424 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

throughout all the space of its working. But such sub- 
stance in its causality becomes force in the meeting and 
counteracting of the two simple agencies, and has thus its 
law put into itself by agencies from above and out of itself, 
and it can only transmit this inherent but imposed law from 
condition to conditioned, indefinitely. It must ever work 
for some end not yet reached, and can not thus ever find its 
own origin or its consummation. It can not propose itself 
as its own end, and thus arrest or modify its agency for its 
own sake ; but must evermore work on, blind to all other 
ends than that of filling space and evolving the conditioned 
from the antecedent condition, and be a thing used by 
others, and not person to use others or itself for its own 
behoof. Its inhering law is yet imposed by a higher, and 
for an end yet to be, and is, therefore, truly heteronomy 
and not pure autonomy. 

And, thirdly, there may be conceived any other distin- 
guishable forces superinduced upon this space-filling force, 
and we may have the forces of magnetism or electricity 
over-ruling but not extinguishing the force of gravity ; or 
chemical or crystalline forces successively over-ruling and 
modifying all on which each may be superinduced ; and we 
shall have each higher distinguishable force possessing its 
own inherent law, and diffusing this law through all the 
sphere of its operation, and thus acting for another and 
higher end than that which lies within any distinguishable 
force beneath it ; but this inherent law will have been still 
imposed upon it by some simple agencies above it, and con- 
ditioning its action to the attainment of ends not yet 
reached, and thus no more an end in itself, and autonomic, 
than the primal antagonistic force of gravity. 



ELEMENTS OF COMPREHENSION. 425 

And, fourthly ', we may have the distinguishable force 
of vegetable life, and which may control all the forces of 
attraction and repulsion, and chemical affinities, and crystal- 
lization, and use them all as subservient to its own higher 
end in assimilation and growth ; yet still will this vegetative 
autonomy be a law imposed from above itself, and necessi- 
tated to a perpetual working for an end beyond itself, and 
can never attain to the completed and final plant in its con- 
summation for which all preceding generations of plants 
have germinated and died. The vital force works on ever- 
more from parent plant to produced germ in the servile toil 
to get an end which is not its own, and under the compul- 
sion to a task which will never be finished. Here is only a 
thing and not person in pure autonomy. 

And this may also be extended to the superinducing of 
the distinguishable force of animal life in its sentient capac- 
ity, and its internal organism for receiving and masticating 
and digesting its food, and this including all the irritability 
of nerve and muscle which induces appetite, and locomotion, 
and selection of food, or objects of appropriate gratification 
for any sense ; and we shall have here a sentient autonomy 
which seems to be a user of many things for its own end in 
its self-gratification, and which, as controlled by self-enjoy- 
ment may sometimes be called will (brutum arbitrium) ; but 
this entire anima is still nature altogether and wholly shut 
up within necessitated successions, and is thus utterly thing 
and not person. The entire animal force is conditioned in 
its primal constitution, and the sensory necessitated in its 
internal pathognomy, and must thus work on as the servant 
of the animal organization and made to do the work which 
the body wants and* when it needs ; and it can never finish 



426 THE EEASOiX IX ITS IDEA. 

its toil, for it is perpetually kept in successive animal organ- 
izations from generation to generation, which never cease 
their craving. It can never rise to the dignity of making 
itself its own end and satisfying itself in its own action, but 
is ever lashed on by a master who imposes the task, and 
reaps the products, and allows that there be occasional grat- 
ifications amid the toil only as necessary to keep the slave 
alive and in a working condition. A sensory is a thing 
under necessity, not a person in autonomy. 

Nor, though we add a light above its own instinctive 
cravings, in which the sentient force may work, shall we 
thus give to it personality. Make it competent to general- 
ize its own past experience and thereby come to the conclu- 
sion that some gratifications cost too much in their subse- 
quent exactions or inflictions, and that there is a rule of pru- 
dence which lies in this generalization of consequences to be 
heeded, and let this rule be very accurately attained in its 
own well-weighed experience ; still every present result is 
already conditioned in some past event, and whether a spe- 
cific appetite shall be strongly excited and control the action, 
or whether a generic desire of self-love as prompted by pru- 
dence shall carry the movement, this is already settled in 
some previous period which has conditioned the sentient 
force then to go out in operation. The end of action is out 
of itself, and imposing its law upon itself, and the sensory 
with all its prudential considerations is conditioned force 
and not will, and acting under a law imposed upon it, and 
not in autonomy. 

Yea, should we conceive that there was the capacity to 
generalize universal experience, and find the rule of pruden- 
tial welfare for all sentient beings ; the force which should 



ELEMENTS OF COMPREHENSION. 427 

go out in beneficence toward all would have been already 
determined in that which has conditioned its amount of sen- 
tient kindness. That it is prudent to itself, and congenial 
to itself, to be kind to others, is a law imposed upon it by 
that which out of itself has conditioned its sentient force to 
be such and so great as it is. Its benevolence would as 
completely stand conditioned in its pathology as any other 
constitutional appetite. It would be the product of its 
physiology as truly as its hunger, and as much bound in the 
series of conditioned changes as its digestion or its growth. 
It is all nature ; wholly a thing and not a person. 

By none of the distinguishable forces of nature, from 
the mere antagonism of the primal force to those of the 
most complicated in animal life and sentient gratification and 
function of judgment in generalized experience, do we find 
any passage to the supernatural, nor any approach to the 
clear discrimination of thing from person. All is wholly 
under law imposed, and in no case itself an end in itself. 
All is a means to an end ; that which knows no indignity in 
being used for another ; a thing that may have a price ; and 
thus never rising to the dignity of personality, which has 
rights that it may not compromit, and can never Consent 
that it should be bought and sold, nor that it should ever 
permit itself to be used by another regardless of its inherent 
autonomy. Just as little is there pure autonomy in nature, 
as there is pure spontaneity ; and though one thing may 
override and control another thing, yet is the highest still a 
thing and subjected to conditions above and out of itself. 

We rise then, fifthly ', to the absolute above nature, as we 
must for determining pure autonomy to personality. And 
here an accurate and extensive discrimination is to be made, 



428 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

and which can not be effected without care, or we shall 
possess this second element of personality but very con- 
fusedly and obscurely. 

Let it be considered that in one aspect the spontaneous 
pure activity may be contemplated as simply artistic. It is to 
go out in the production or creation of distinguishable forces, 
and thus in the genesis of a nature of things. But in such 
going forth of the pure activity there must be some end to 
be attained, and some law must be given to the process by 
which the agency may go out the most directly and com- 
pletely to its issue. This can not be in the light of any copy 
or pattern already objectively existing, in which may be 
found the model of what is yet to be, for the creator of 
nature has not yet an objective universe after which he may 
fashion another. As artist, the absolute must possess the 
primary copies or patterns of what it is possible may be, in 
his own subjective apprehension, and the first" creations are 
subjective in the absolute reason as universal genius. The 
pure ideals of all possible entities lie as pure reason-cogni- 
tions in the light of the divine intelligence, and in these 
must be found the rules after which the creative agency 
must go forth. That subjective pure archetype of what is 
to have objective being in an actual space-filling force, is the 
law by which the pure spontaneity is to be controlled. The 
agency which has this subjective archetypal rule in its own 
light has artistic genius, and such directing genius may be 
termed wisdom. When nature is to be brought forth into 
space and time, the creator must possess this in the begin- 
ning of his way. Of the whole work, this artistic wisdom 
personified may say, " When He prepared the Heavens I 
was there ; when He set a compass upon the face of the 



ELEMENTS OF COMPREHENSION. 429 

depth ; when He established the clouds above ; when He 
strengthened the fountains of the deep ; when He gave to 
the sea His decree that the waters should not pass His com- 
mandments ; when He appointed the foundations of the 
earth ; then I was by Him as one brought up with Him, 
and I was daily His delight, rejoicing ever before Him." 
And now this artistic wisdom and rule is, in one acceptation, 
autonomy ; it is law and guide for the creative agency, and 
it is a possession in the absolute itself. It is like the archi- 
tect who has his own rules in his own intellectual being. 
He is in an important sense a self-regulated agent, w r orking 
after his own subjective archetypal pattern. 

But this will not suffice for the attainment of a pure 
autonomy. This artistic' skill is something to be used, and 
the personality using has not yet been found. What is to 
determine that it shall work ? and after what pattern it 
shall work ? and whether at the expense of marring the 
product the workman shall not be induced to violate the 
artistic rule ? If there be nothing but some want in a sen- 
sory to be satisfied, like a mechanic who builds his own 
dwelling for his own convenience, then will the end be found 
in the gratification of that craving ; and no matter how 
skillful, how spacious, or how costly the building, it has all 
been conditioned to the want he found himself constrained 
to gratify, and for which the agency must go forth, or his 
sentient nature must abide the unhappy consequences. The 
value of the w r ork and of the workman is estimated solely 
by the sentient gratification as end. 

When material worlds in all their distinguishable forces 
have been put into space, and gravitating, and chemical, and 
crystalline agencies have been made to develop themselves 



430 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

in perfect conformity to the archetypal rule ; if, then, this 
material creation is to be clothed in the verdant beauty and 
luxuriance of vegetative life, and the sentient want in the 
maker and his artistic pattern be given, the work will go on 
to this higher consummation and the gratification be therein 
attained. And should, again, all this beauty and bounty 
seem to lie waste, as the stream in a desert, until some sen- 
tient created beings be introduced to partake and enjoy, 
and the great Architect find within himself a want that 
can only be satisfied by making and seeing sentient beings 
happy ; then would the artistic energy again be put forth to 
gratify this craving desire in his own sentient being, and 
the air, and waters, and earth o'er all its hills and plains will 
teem with living happy millions. "We might thus go on 
through indefinitely higher grades of sentient desires, and 
furnish our artist with higher patterns for created products, 
and we should keep an artistic skill perpetually energizing 
for the gratification of sentient wants, and which, if finally 
terminating in some highest wants and thus in some highest 
happiness, would still be all of nature. The want is found 
to be already determined ; a conditioned nature condition- 
ing all the working, and all the products of the artistic 
workman ; and which is thus a mere automaton, not pure 
autonomy. 

We may essay to elevate such artistic autonomy which 
merely governs its actions by the rules given and for the end 
of gratifying some sentient wants, to the place of supreme 
author of nature, and as if we had found in this a personal 
Deity may call him the divine Architect ; and his wisdom 
may be consummate in adapting means to ends, and manifold 
in working ; but the end of all is already conditioned in his 



ELEMENTS OF COMPREHENSION. 431 

necessary sentient cravings, and as truly in nature when his 
own want can be satisfied only with the happiness of other 
sentient beings as when the animal hungers for its daily 
food. Whoever possesses the sensory with its craving want 
must seek for this artistic skill, and use the artisan only for 
the gratification to which he may minister ; and he may thus 
be good in the acceptation of useful beyond all else, inas- 
much as he alone may minister to the highest want. Such 
an artist, to such highest sentient craving, would be invalu- 
able ; above all price in exchange ; worth more than all else, 
because serving a want the highest of all ; and, brought in 
barter to the market, would buy out all that in the universe 
could be put to sale ; but still this would be only a thing 
among other things as goods in the market, and more valu- 
able only as a more profitable instrument for the gratification 
of a higher sentient end. He is a workman who can guide 
his hand by his own eye, and whose skill is worth so much 
by the day or by the job to the employer who wants him. 
He is only a means to be used for an end, precisely as a mas- 
ter may want the higher faculties of his slave to accomplish 
such ends as he can never reach by the brute strength and 
instinct of his horse, and on this account only the slave is 
worth just so much more than the horse. "When the abso- 
lute is thus viewed as a means to some end in sense, and 
out of and apart from his own intrinsic excellency as end, 
he is at once degraded from a sovereign to a servant ; from 
a person to a thing ; he exists for what he makes ; his price 
is fixed by his products ; and he is worth so much more 
than other workmen only as he can make better wares. A 
sentient nature, somewhere secretly wound up to an undeni- 
able craving, is the spring which sets the automaton in 



432 THE REASON IX ITS IDEA. 

action ; and he works for, and works out, the end for which 
he is already conditioned in his own constitution. The only 
autonomy that may be affirmed of such an artist is, that he 
carries his rules in his head, but the spring and end of his 
action are wholly from and in another who employs him. 
We have not thus attained to any Personality. 

What we need is not merely a rule by which to direct 
the process in the attainment of any artistic end, but we 
must find the legislator who may determine the end itself. 
This question is not the ultimate — In what way shall an 
artist be furnished with rules for doing his work to the 
greatest perfection ? When that is decided to be after his 
own pure subjective archetypes, the ultimate question is 
altogether this — Whence is the ultimate behest that is to 
determine the archetype and control the pure spontaneity in 
its action ? Shall it go out in an antagonism as central force, 
in which shall be the genesis of an ensphered and revolving 
space-filling substance? and why thus? Shall we answer, 
it must be thus in order that a subsequent superinducing 
of distinguishable forces upon this mere space-filling sub- 
stance, such as magnetic chemical and crystalline agencies, 
may all together work on and work out the complicated but 
exact machinery of a material universe through all its com- 
ponent systems and worlds? But why such a material uni- 
verse in its perfect architecture ? Shall we again answer, 
this is all thus in order that the beauty and bounty of a 
vegetative life may be spread over hill and valley ? — but 
why this exuberance of vegetative life ? In order, again 
shall we say, that glad sentient beings may people the ma- 
terial worlds, and find a home amid all these adaptations in 
the heavens above and the earth beneath to their animal 



ELEMENTS OF COMPREHENSION. 433 

wants ? — but again the inquiry is just as prompt and urgent 
— why this world of sentient beings ? And should we again 
answer : all this is for this great end, that some sentient 
beings may possess the exalted faculty of generalizing their 
own and their fellows' experience, and determining rules of 
utility, and prudence, and economy, which must regulate the 
action of each for his own highest welfare, and the interac- 
tion of all for the highest happiness of the whole ; and that 
thus there may be a social organization and a political sover- 
eignty, which may administer a government of penal sanc- 
tions, coercing each to act for the highest happiness of all ? 
But this social world, thus legislating for itself on the grand 
principle of its highest happiness in the aggregate, is still a 
created world ; a product of an artist after the rule of his 
own subjective archetypal perfection ; — why such a social 
world? — whence the behest that set this artist to his work, 
and called out this artistic wisdom in the service ? And h«re 
shall we answer, as if it were to stop all further questionings 
that this artist had a sensory the gratification of whose 
highest desire was the impartation of happiness to other 
sentient beings ; and that thus his own inner want put him- 
to the work of making other sentient beings, who in their 
own happiness might satisfy him and make him to attain his 
maximum of gratification? But surely in this,, we have 
nothing but nature in its necessitated conditions. The abso^ 
lute is simply kind and good-natured, and acts from consti- 
tutional cravings, as really as all other sentient natures. 
The susceptibility to happiness from benevolent action is- in 
this way as truly an appetite in its awakened desire^ and 
necessitated in all its cravings, as any animal want.. Ques- 
tions like these still necessarily return — Why such, suscepti?- 

10 



434 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

bility to beneficence ? — What if the want in the sensory- 
had been of an opposite kind ? Must the artist work merely 
because there is an inner want to gratify, with no higher end 
than the gratification of the highest constitutional craving ? 
Can we find nothing beyond a want, which shall from its 
own behest demand, that this and not its opposite shall be ? 
Grant that the round worlds and all their furniture are good 
— but why good ? Certainly as a means to an end. Grant 
that this end, the happiness of sentient beings, is good — but 
why good ? Because it supplies the want of the supreme 
Architect. And is this the supreme good ? Surely, if it is, 
we are altogether within nature's conditions, call our ulti- 
mate attainment by what name we may. We have no ori- 
gin for our legislation, only as the highest architect finds 
such wants within himself, and the archetypal rule for grati- 
fying his wants in the most effectual manner ; and precisely 
as the ox goes to his fodder in the shortest way, so he goes 
to his work in making and peopling happy worlds in the 
most direct manner. Here is no will ; no personality ; no 
pure autonomy. The artist finds himself so constituted that 
he must work im this manner, or the craving of his own 
nature becomes intolerable to himself, and the gratifying of 
this craving is the highest good. 

We must find that which shall itself be the reason and 
law for benevolence, and for the sake of which the artist shall 
be put to his beneficent agency above all considerations that 
he finds his nature craving it It must be that for whose 
sake happiness, even that which as kind and benevolent, 
craves on all sides the boon to bless others, itself should be. 
Not sentient nor artistic autonomy, but a pure ethic auto- 
nomy which knows that within itself there is an excellency 



ELEMENTS OF COMPREHENSION. 435 

which obliges for the sake of itself. This is never to be 
found, nor anything very analogous to it, in sentient nature 
and a dictate from some generalized experience. It lies 
within the rational spirit and is law in the heart, as an inward 
imperative in its own right, and must there be found. The 
pregnant illustration of the Apostle is explicit that spirit 
only may know what is in spirit : " What man knoweth the 
things of a man save the spirit of man which is in him ? 
even so the things of God knoweth no man but the spirit 
of God. The spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things 
of God." This inward witnessing capacitates for self-legis- 
lating and self-rewarding. It is inward consciousness of a 
worth imperative above want; an end in itself, and not 
means to another end ; a user of things but not itself to be 
used by anything ; and, on account of its intrinsic excel- 
lency, an authoritative determiner for its own behoof of the 
entire artistic agency ivith all its products, and thus a con- 
science excusing or accusing. 

This inward witnessing of the absolute in his own wor- 
thiness, gives the ultimate estimate to nature, which needs 
and can attain to nothing higher, than that it should satisfy 
this worthiness as end ; and thereby in all his works, he 
fixes, in his own light, upon the subjective archetype, and 
attains to the objective result, of that which is befitting his 
own dignity. It is, therefore, in no craving want which 
must be gratified, but from the interest of an inner behest, 
which should be executed for his own worthiness' sake, that 
" God has created all things, and for His pleasure they are 
and were created." 

It is not sufficient that a product is attained which is 
good only as a means to some further end ; nor yet that a 



436 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

personality is assumed who is only artistic skill and wisdom, 
for this is only means to an end, and wholly a servant for an- 
other's using ; nor yet that this servant have wants, even 
that he should make others happy for the sake of his own 
happiness, for this keeps him in servitude still, inasmuch as 
the want can only be as a means to the creation of a happy 
race, and the creation of such a race a means only to satisfy 
such a want ; but above all the artistic skill and the imparted 
happiness, we must come into the light and purity and 
majesty ineffable of an uncreated personality, before whose 
presence all this sublimity of architecture and all this exuber- 
ance of bounty and of gladness may be laid as an offering, 
whose only estimate can be that it is worthy to be accepted 
of him, and whose only end can be that it has been created 
for him. The summum bonum is in his dignity and excel- 
lence, and in this the great Eternal read the law how created 
nature should be, and under such behest the fiat went forth, 
and such Nature is. 

It is precisely in this light, and solely in this presence, 
that we wake to the consciousness of what reverence is, and 
know that we stand before an awful Majesty where we must 
bow and adore. We may stand amid all the sublimities of 
that wonder-working power which is fashioning the material 
mechanism of the heavens and the earth, and we shaft 
admire and praise in profound astonishment ; we may look 
upon all the arrangements which, in the bounty of an ever- 
working wisdom and kindness, is diffusing sentient joy and 
gladness over millions of happy beings ; and we may go 
with such as are competent to recognize their kind benefac- 
tor into His presence, and hear the ten thousand times ten 
thousand voices, in different ways proclaiming their glad- 



ELEMENTS OF COMPREHENSION. 437 

some gratitude as the sound of many waters, and we shall 
sympathize in their joys and praises with a rapturous delight ; 
but it is only when I see all these standing in the presence 
of that absolute sovereignty and pure moral personality, 
who searches them all in the light of His own dignity, and 
judges them by the claims of His own excellency, and esti- 
mates their worth solely in reference to His worthiness ; and 
when also I see that thus it behoved they should have been 
made, to be fit creatures of His ordering and accepting, and 
that He made them thus after the behest of His own un- 
created reason, and in the light of His ethical truth and 
righteousness, and governs them and holds them ever subor- 
dinate to His own moral glory and authority; it is in such a 
presence only, that I reverently cover my face, and fall pros- 
trate, and cry from my inward spirit, " Holy, Holy, Holy, 
Lord God Almighty ," " Heaven and earth are full of Thy 
glory." " Thou art worthy O Lord, to receive glory, and 
honor, and power, for Thou hast created all things, and for 
Thy pleasure they are, and were created." 

In this is the very essence of personality, that it may 
assume in its own right the authority to control its own 
agency ; and may lay claim to the high prerogative of being 
an end, and must resist whatsoever would degrade it to be 
used as a means to any other than its own end. In this is 
Conscience ; which must forbid all intrusion from any possi- 
ble source within its own domain, and in violation of its 
own end as moral character. And in this also is Will ; that 
the act is not nature necessitated in its conditions, nor 
alone pure spontaneity in its blindness, but held in control 
by that witness of what is due to itself as personality ; and 
thus possessing that inward spring in the interest of its own 



438 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

worthiness, which may resist, and shut out, and beat down, 
all that would seduce or force it from allegiance to the 
claims of its own dignity. Nor except in the possession of 
such intrinsic excellence and dignity of being, and for the 
behest of which every thing else must be trodden under- 
foot, can there be an agency, however mighty, or skillful or 
beneficent, that may be permitted to take rank among per- 
sonalities ; but at the highest must be put among utilities, 
which may command its own price, but can never claim a 
reverence for its own dignity. We thus come to the safe 
conclusion, that in order to personality the absolute must 
have, not only the element of pure spontaneity, which 
would give autocracy, but moreover that inward witness of 
its own worth and dignity which makes itself end and not 
means, and which gives pure Autonomy. 

3. Pure spontaneity in the absolute is simple act, stand- 
ing above all the conditions of force, and thus above all 
necessity as nature. But mere spontaneity is blind action, 
aimless and lawless, and though essential to personality is 
not itself sufficient for it. Pure autonomy is end above 
nature, and in its own intrinsic excellency worthy to be end 
itself and thus a law to its own action. It gives the inward 
witness of a right to hold on to its own worthiness as end 
in every action ; and that it behoves itself never to let its 
action become subservient to any end that collides with its 
own dignity ; and thus affords the spring within itself, in 
the interest of its own excellency, to control and direct its 
own agency. The intrinsic excellency and dignity of the 
being gives its own law to the action of the being, and 
hence it is no longer pure spontaneity merely, but sponta- 
neity under law, viz., the behest of its own intrinsic excel- 



ELEMENTS OF COMPREHENSION. 439 

lency. This antithesis of pure spontaneity and pure auto- 
nomy has its point of indifference — i. e., a point in which 
pure spontaneity combines with or comes under the auto- 
nomy, and is no longer mere spontaneity but spontaneous 
act governed ; and also in which the pure autonomy com- 
bines with the sj)ontaneity, and is no longer mere autonomy 
but self-law governing. We have, thus, not the two ele- 
ments in their separate singularity, as set over the one 
against the other ; but in their interaction as in synthesis 
one with the other, so that we may say that neither is ex- 
tinct, and that neither in itself is, but a tertium quid is, 
which may be called indifferently a self-act governed, or a 
self-law governing. In this synthesis of self-action and self- 
law a will first emerges, and the very essence of person as 
distinct from thing is in the possession of will. In this only 
can the being have possession of his own action, and in this 
having of his action comes his capacity to behave. Respon- 
sibility to his inner self calls for perpetual allegiance to the 
authority of this inner sovereignty. In the absolute unde- 
rived I am, this self-agency and self-law is ever in perfect 
synthesis, undisturbed by any intruding act or colliding law 
from any possible quarter, and thus ever a pure will in the 
tranquillity of its perfect holiness. 

When, therefore, we have the element of pure sponta- 
neity and pure autonomy in synthesis, we have a third rea- 
son-cognition in a completed personality, which is pure lib- 
erty. Without spontaneity the absolute must be linked in 
the necessitated successions of nature ; without autonomy 
it must be mere blind and lawless action ; but in the syn- 
thesis of these there is a will, which may make its alterna- 
tive to any foreign end, or agency, or law that can obtrude 



440 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

itself, and thus a liberty. A will in liberty is completed 
personality. 

It is important that we come accurately to discriminate 
this reason-cognition of pure liberty from all the false and 
spurious understanding-cognitions of freedom with which it 
is often confounded ; or rather above which it has very gen- 
erally been denied that it is possible for the intellect to 
reach ; and thus, by denying the possible conception of pure 
liberty, the entire province of the supernatural has really 
been discarded. The Deity, proposed to the faith of many 
an assumed Theist, has been in this way a mere JYaturatus y 
a deity bound utterly in the discursive connections of sub- 
stance and cause. In vain will any assumed terms, bor- 
rowed from the supernatural, be brought in to assist us ; 
without a pure liberty we can not rise above nature. 

In the operations of cause and effect, when the work is 
unhindered by any opposition, it is often said that nature is 
free. But all application of the term freedom to nature 
must be with a different acceptation than that it is pure lib- 
erty. Nature can in none of its operations be found as an 
agent controlling its action for itself as end, but is every 
where going out into effects in which there can be no rest- 
ing as end, but which always exist only as means to a fur- 
ther end. Nature is wholly a means, and can never cease 
its action as if it had found its consummation in itself, and 
had thereby satisfied itself; but must work on interminably, 
and ever in the line that a previous condition has made al- 
ready to be necessity. It may be free in this acceptation, 
that its development has nothing in advance to condition it, 
and thus its work goes on unhindered. The progressus of 
cause and effect finds ever an open and unobstructed path- 



ELEMENTS OP COMPREHENSION. 441 

way. But in all cases the working of nature must be con- 
ditioned by something from behind, and urged forward by 
a force a tergo, both that it must be, and be just what it be- 
comes. In no one step of nature is there any alternative ; 
from what already is, that step which is now proximately 
future must be taken, and must be so taken as has already 
been conditioned. There is no autonomy, no will, no per- 
sonality, consequently no liberty. 

Again, the animal is often said to choose^ and that choice 
is freedom. But the word choice is very ambiguous ; and 
the freedom of choice may be equivocal, with very different 
meanings in different applications. The anima is a sensi- 
tive nature superinduced upon a vegeta ; and animal life is 
as truly nature as vegetable life. The force of vegetative 
life is, also, superinduced upon material being ; but all the 
distinguishable forces in material being and that of vegeta- 
tion are alike nature. And now of all, we may say that 
they have their affinities or congenialities, and that they thus 
make selections, and in all cases this selecting may be a 
force which works unhindered ; but by whatever name we 
call it, we shall be able to see that so far as its freedom is 
concerned it is in all cases alike, and is simply that of un- 
hindered causation ; not at all, that which from the end of 
its own worthiness can bring in an ethical spring as alterna- 
tive to nature's conditions, and thus in liberty. Chemical 
combinations select according to conditioning elective affini- 
ties ; crystalline formations select the homogeneous from the 
heterogeneous ; the magnet selects the steel-filings from saw- 
dust; the fire selects the stubble from the stones; the plant 
selects its own congenial nourishment ; the ox selects grass, 
and the tiger selects flesh ; but all these varieties of selec- 

19* 



442 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

tion are alike in nature, and necessitated by their conditions. 
We may give the name of choice to the animal selection ; 
but it is not because there is any approach toward a will in 
liberty, that may supply an alternative to nature's condi- 
tions ; and if it seem less appropriate to say the fire chooses 
than that the animal chooses, it is only as we permit our- 
selves to be deluded with the false play of the understand- 
ing, which would assume to rise from thing and approach 
to person, by merely modifying discursive conditions. The 
u half-reasoning elephant," and the " architectural beaver ;" 
the " cunning fox," and the " sagacious dog," all rise to the 
exercise of a force which concludes in a judgment according 
to conditions in the sense, and thus come quite within the 
province of an understanding, and we may thus be less of- 
fended by applying to them the attributes of personality 
than to inanimate, insensate matter ; but the one is no more 
removed from the fixed chain of conditions in nature than 
the other, and the action of the most intelligent animal is as 
little in liberty, and as truly necessitated by previous condi- 
tions, as the fire or the magnet. All is controlled by the 
sentient nature, which in every act has its condition in some 
already conditioned events, and which no amount of sagac- 
ity can lift out of the bondage of necessity. That its action 
in a change of perceived circumstances changes, is no more 
an index of choice in liberty, than that the current of the 
stream changes its direction when it meets the obstacle 
thrust in the way of its progress. The conditions at the 
time are the events which have come out from a previous 
period, and are themselves the conditioning facts of what is 
next to arise ; and amid such conditions, neither the magnet, 
the stream, the vegetable, nor the animal, can bring in the 



ELEMENTS OF COMPREHENSION. 443 

interest of a dignity in its own personality, as spring to 
carry itself against, or to throw itself out of the necessitated 
successions of nature. All its freedom is this, an unhin- 
dered progression in following down the current of nature's 
conditions. The choices of animal nature are component 
links in this iron chain as truly as the effects of gravity. It 
is controlled by appetite and thus by nature, not by its own 
behest in reason, and thus in liberty. Hence the animal is 
ever thing, and never person ; it has a price, but not a dig- 
nity. 

Man, also, by so much as he is sentient, is animal only. 
All the cravings of his sensory are constitutional and thus 
conditioned, and the action in an appetite and in its gratifi- 
cation is wholly of nature. As animal alone, man has no 
will in liberty, and thus no more a personality that the brute 
which perisheth. Except as man has a higher endowment 
than a sentient nature, and in which he may find an inner 
witness of an intrinsic excellency and dignity, that forbid all 
prostitution of itself to be used as means to gain any end of 
the sensory, but which is imperative that air possible gratifi- 
cation of sentient nature shall be wholly controlled and even 
thrust aside and beat down for the higher end of its own 
worthiness, and which may thus take hold upon an interest 
in its own excellency of being, and resist and subjugate all 
the clamorous appetites of sense, and hold them in perpet- 
ual servitude to its own ethical end, he neither has nor can 
have any personality nor responsibility, inasmuch as other- 
wise he can possess no will in liberty. He may bow his per- 
sonality to the ends of animal gratification, and in his depravity 
make the ethical to serve the sensual ; but it is because of 
this inner witness of intrinsic excellency and dignity de- 



444 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

graded and debased, that he has remorse as a gnawing 
worm. 

His personality in his will is thus enslaved to sense and 
subjected to nature, but it can never lay aside its high pre- 
rogatives and become nature. In its lowest degradation 
and debasement in guilt, the inner withness of its own intrin- 
sic rights disregarded and sacrificed will give a perpetual 
self-condemnation, and urge the behest to reassert and regain 
its rightful supremacy and authority. Man can only thus 
sell his liberty to the sense against the constant claims of his 
own personality, and stand every moment self-condemned 
in his self-degradation. Were he only animal he would "i 
ruminate in quiet enjoyment upon the past croppings of 
sense ; it is the recoil of the accusing spirit back upon itself 
in conscious guilt and debasement, that gives the sting to 
all man's reflections upon his sensuality. Deprive him of 
this higher endowment and you leave him wholly to nature, 
and no matter how extensive his force of understanding in 
generalizing his own and his fellow's experience, and attain- 
ing the rules of prudence and benevolence ; he can make 
neither to be an end, except as • he find the want already in 
the sensory, and that want as conditioned in nature will 
condition the act, and link that also in the necessities of 
nature. 

But, in determining to the absolute his own right to be 
himself his end of action, in the dignity of his own excel- 
lency, and thus to control his pure activity by his own 
worthiness as ethical law, and that whatever may be the 
ends proposed out of himself he may fix upon them or 
utterly exclude them according to this behest in the inner 
witnessing of the rights of his own being, we have that 



ELEMENTS OF COMPREHENSION. 445 

self-agency and self-law which is spring for alternative action 
to any ends possible to be presented, and thus is ever pure 
will in the sovereignty of its perfect law of liberty. He is 
a personality above nature, who may steady Himself against 
the obtrusion of all ends in a real nature of things or all 
archetypes in a possible nature of things, and stand utterly 
unconditioned by an actual or a possible series of condition 
and conditioned, and answer only to the supreme, all-con- 
trolling ethical claims of his inner being, viz., that he 
magnify his own worthiness as his highest good, and the 
absolute end and right. This is quite other than the free- 
dom of unhindered causality ; or, the choices of sentient 
nature that go out in gratification for conditioned wants ; 
even the acts of rational Personality in a will, which, though 
not lawless, has only an ethical law in liberty. 

That may be said to be the good toill, in the acceptation 
of the holy will, which is pure spontaneous act under the 
ethical law of its own dignity as person ; which knows no 
colliding end with the ethical law ; which preserves the per- 
fect tranquillity of finding every end in -his own interest 
perfectly conformed to the ethical end of his own worthi- 
ness ; and thus never subjected to the conflict of a law in 
himself with a law out of himself. That would be the 
good will in the sense of the virtuous will, which has the 
colliding of sensual end with ethical end, but which in the 
conflict ever valorously beats back and subordinates the sen- 
sual end. Such may ever have the peace of a strong and 
watchful government, but never the tranquillity of perfect 
love. This is self-regnant, the other self-complacent. 

The Divine will must ever be the purely holy will in its 
tranquillity. The Absolute, as pure Uncreated Reason, can 



446 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

have no ends appealing to any interest in collision with that 
which is the highest ethical law of Reason ; ever to act 
according to his own rationality, or, as the same thing, 
worthy of himself. It is thus in the same sense " impossible 
that God should lie" as it is that " He can not deny Himself." 
He " ever abideth faithful,' inasmuch as within the person- 
ality of the absolute reason, it would be absurd that there 
should be an interest that should collide with the highest 
rationality. All possible ends must, to the Absolute Reason, 
be held in subordination to its own end, and this is the con- 
trol of pure spontaneity by a pure autonomy, and which, as 
furnishing an alternative to all possible ends as interest, is 
pure Liberty, These three, Spontaneity, Autonomy, and 
Liberty, are all the elements which determine Personality ; 
and, as in the Ideal of the Absolute, determined in His per- 
sonality, we are to comprehend universal nature, so in these, 
we have the primitive Elements of an operation of Com- 
prehension. 



SECTION III. 



THE A PRIORI COMPREHENSION OF NATURE IN THE PURE 
PERSONALITY OF THE ABSOLUTE. 

Personality involves pure spontaneity under a pure 
autonomy, and this is the sole condition of pure liberty. It 
is a capacity of action in will, and possesses within itself the 
spring of an alternative to any possible external end which may 
be proposed to it. This is pure self-determination ; not as 
arbitrament with no end, for this would be the absurdity of 



A PRIORI COMPREHENSION OF NATURE. 447 

a determination undermined ; but an arbitrament from the 
ethical end of its own excellency, and to the ethical end of 
its own worthiness. The supreme intrinsic excellency of 
the absolute, as person, is itself the reason and the ethical 
behest that he should not be a means to any end out of 
Himself. It behoves that he be the user of all possible 
things, and that he be used by nothing possible. His own 
agency should be directed by those rights which are insepar- 
able from his own excellency. 

All right as ethical exists in personality, and is founda- 
tion for the peremptory demand that nature as servant shall 
find its end in the person, and that no possible end in nature 
shall be permitted by the person to hold himself in bondage 
to it. Finite personalities must in this respect be in the 
likeness of the absolute person, and each be an end in him- 
self which he may never subordinate to any end in nature 
without violating the rights of personality and making him- 
self guilty of self-degradation. It would thus involve an 
ethical absurdity that the absolute person, for whose use is 
all possible nature, might use the finite personality as he 
may use nature. Nature is not end itself, and can have no 
rights, and can therefore never rise above the instrumental ; 
personality, even finite, has rights which it would be an 
unworthiness in the absolute to disregard or invade. The 
ultimate end and supreme good of the Divine dignity will 
give an ethical behest that all of material and sentient 
nature be used as thing, and that all of moral being be 
treated as person. A sovereignty supreme and universal, 
legislating and governing in the right and for the end of his 
own dignity with a purely holy will, must control the mate- 
rial and moral worlds, by widely different laws ; condition- 



448 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

ing all of the former in the necessitated connections of 
nature, and holding all of the latter to the responsibilities 
of " the witness within" as the perfect law of liberty. 
Nature must glorify its maker as thing to be used for an 
end not its own ; finite personality, as offspring of the Deity, 
must glorify God in the joyful service which it is its own 
ethical end lovingly to render. 

But such conception of personality, which may originate 
action from a spring within itself and control a consumma- 
tion that shall be wholly for itself, is exclusively a reason-con- 
ception. To the understanding, all that is personality, or a 
will in liberty, must be wholly without signification. Its 
functions can only connect discursively and never contemplate 
existence comprehensively ; and that there should be action 
from a being who may originate and consummate within him- 
self, must to it be utterly unintelligible. But if we will keep 
our philosophy here wholly within the province of the super- 
natural, and not permit the illusions of discursive connections 
in an understanding to obtrude themselves upon us, we may 
surely and soundly attain to an a priori demonstration. In 
order to this it is now quite necessary to guard against any 
deceptive ambiguities in the terms which it may be conven- 
ient w r e should here use. We have transcended the whole 
region of phenomena as the qualities and events constructed 
in place and period, and our use of the word attribute, as 
applied to the elements of personality, must not be consid- 
ered at all the phenomenal quality which inheres in a space- 
filling substance, and may be given in sensation and con^ 
structed in a definite quantity. 

And so, moreover, have we transcended all the region of 
the notional, which as substances and causes connect nature 



A PEIOEI COMPREHENSION OF NATURE. 449 

in a universe ; and when we now use the terms influence, 
power, essence, or source as referable to person, we must not 
at all consider these as the physical forces, which in nature 
may be made to push or pull and thereby modify and dis- 
place existing things. Even when it is convenient to borrow 
words from the understanding, and thus bring up the terms 
from the natural to the supernatural, and call the absolute a 
First Cause, and speak of the behest of his own dignity as 
causative determiner of his acts, or of the will as causality 
of the personal agency, we are by no means to allow our- 
selves to come under the delusion, as if with the terms there 
had come up the things of nature, and that such supernatural 
causation had any connection with nature's causes in their 
necessitated conditions. If the words are sometimes bor- 
rowed, the meanings must never be confounded. The attri- 
butes and causalities of the supernatural both transcend and 
comprehend the qualities and causalities of the natural. All 
the substantiality and causality of nature originate in, and 
are used by, the absolute will in liberty. Thus- carefully dis- 
criminating our reason-conceptions of personality from all 
understanding-conceptions of things in nature, we now pro- 
ceed to the consideration of a possible comprehension of 
universal nature in the absolute personality. 

As incorporeal and uncreated reason and will, the- abso- 
lute has his own spring of action within himself, and in thd3 
a power in liberty which is wholly above and separate from 
all force in nature, and which may be creative of force. He 
may originate simple acts which, in their own simplicity, 
have no counter-agency and can therefore never be brought 
under any of the conditions of space and time and nature. 

From his own inner capacity of self-determination he 



450 THE REASON IX ITS IDEA. 

may designedly put simple acts in counteraction and at their 
point of counter-agency a force begins which takes a position 
in space and occupies an instant in time. There is a begin- 
ning in something where nothing was; and this has position, 
instant, and permanence. The perpetuated energizing in 
counteraction is creation in progress, inasmuch as force accu- 
mulates about that point of antagonism, and enspheres itself 
upon it as a center ; and a space is thereby filled, which may 
be conjoined in a definite figure ; a time is thus occupied 
which maybe conjoined in a definite period; and an impene- 
trable substance is made, which may give content in a sensi- 
bility, and be conjoined in a definite phenomenon. Above 
that point of counter-agency all is simple activity — unphe- 
nomenal and unsubstantial, and having all its essentiality in 
the power of the supernatural as will in liberty ; in, and 
below that point all is force — phenomenal in the perception 
of the sense, and substantial and causal in the judgment of 
the understanding, and existing as physical nature in its 
necessitated conditions. In this substance, place in its own 
one whole of space is determinable ; and in this also, as source 
for successive events, period in one whole of time may be 
determined; and thus an existence is given in a space and 
a time, which can not come and depart as in a mirror or a 
dream. The energizing of the absolute will may fill so 
much of this one whole of space, and do this in so much of 
this one whole of time, as shall be directed by the archetypal 
rule of his artistic wisdom ; and may give the modifications 
of distinguishable forces, also, in accordance with such rule ; 
and all for the end of his own worthiness : and thus, at the 
fiat of the absolute will, nature is, with all her substances, 
causes and reciprocal forces, and with all the tribes of vege- 



A PEI0EI COM PREHENSION OF NATTTEE. 451 

table, animal, and human beings. God need only to will it, 
" and for His pleasure they are," Nature henceforth goes 
on in her development according to the law of physical 
forces, and is perpetually a natura naturans ; but, at the 
great central point of all counter-working, and in all the 
points of a superposition of distinguishable forces, a condi- 
tioning of nature is determined by the absolute in his own 
liberty, and thus all nature is still natura naturata. Physi- 
cal causes perpetually work on, and all is thus causa causans / 
but all these causes are conditioned in their sources by the 
self-determining will of the absolute, and are thus causa 
causata. The power which imposes conditions upon nature, 
and gives causality to causes, is wholly above all the condi- 
tions and causes of nature, and with nothing of the neces- 
sities of physical force, has no other controller than the 
supreme artistic wisdom under the behest of the absolute in 
liberty. And still further, while this space-filling force takes 
its place in space, and is impenetrable, inasmuch as it can 
admit the substance of no other space-filling force into its 
locality except in its own displacement, so also is all the reflex 
action of this engendered and ensphered force sustained upon 
the central point of the primal antagonism. Action and 
reaction, attraction and repulsion, centripetal and centrifugal 
agency fill the whole sphere of universal nature; but no 
working of physical forces can press back of the central 
point in which they have their genesis, and invade the world 
of the supernatural. The Deity needs but to will the coun- 
teraction in its perpetuated force, and universal nature finds its 
equilibrium in the repulsion from the center and the reflex 
pressure to the center, and holds itself suspended on its own 
conditioned forces, without the possibility of any weariness 



452 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

or exhaustion to its maker. It is wholly the product of the 
Divine will, and wholly the act of the absolute ; and while 
utterly dependent for its being upon the Divine will, can yet 
never react upon or in any way condition the being and 
agency of the omnipotent producer. It is thereby a verita- 
ble creation distinct from its creator, of which it may intelli- 
gently be affirmed, that the creator is conditional for it, but 
it in no wise conditions the creator. Within it are contained 
all the series of conditioned and thus of necessitated succes- 
sions ; and from the rudimental germs in their primal crea- 
tion as distinguishable forces, is already determined the fact 
and the order of development. The conditions for enspher- 
ing worlds ; for centripetal and centrifugal forces, and the 
ratios of their action both as to quantity and distance from 
the center ; their revolutions upon their axes, and their 
orbits about their primaries ; and the relative inclination of 
the planes of these orbits, and of the axes of the spheres to 
them, and of the proportions of the axes of each to their 
equatorial diameters ; and, in short, the whole formal arrange- 
ments of the universe are given in the very points where 
the primordial forces have their genesis ; as is also the whole 
science of nature in its original bi-polar, chemical, crystalline, 
vegetable and animal forces. An a priori philosophy may 
long be detained in this broad field, before it shall be com- 
petent to detect all these forces in their distinguishable rudi- 
ments, but their laws, and thus all their possible conditioned 
changes, have already been settled in their creation, and may 
be determined. 

All this context of conditions, constituting universal 
nature, is dependent, while the absolute maker is wholly 
independent ; it is his creature and subjected to his use. 



A PEIOEI COMPREHENSION OF NATURE. 453 

He is its Lord, and has the right of sovereignty over it to 
make it subservient to the end of His own dignity. It is, 
only because He is ; and the ethical behest of his own ex- 
cellency has summoned it to fill its place, and endure its 
time, and subserve His purpose. God made it, and is wholly 
independent of it; and thus both Atheism and Pantheism 
are utterly excluded, in this reason-cognition of the absolute 
as person. This determination of an origin to nature, in its 
own space and time, is a oomplete comprehension of nature 
on the side of nature's beginning. 

And now, that on the other side we may comprehend 
nature in its consummation , Ave have the same compass of 
an all-embracing reason in the absolute as personality, and 
who as having the final end of all His agency in Himself, 
must govern and direct all of nature to the end for which it 
has been created by Him. The Supreme Architect must 
have the archetypes of all possible nature in His own sub- 
jective apprehension. There is no inward craving want of 
a sensory, which may subject the will to the bondage of a 
blind necessity in going out to gratify it, nor put the will in 
a perpetually militant attitude in resisting it ; but there is 
the one high and controlling behest of His own excellency, 
that every possible end shall be determined in subserviency 
to the right of His own worthiness. It is the highest ra- 
tionality, that the absolute reason be Himself the end of all 
ends. This inward ethical spring to all action finds no pos- 
sible collision in the Divine bosom, and nothing hinders His 
will in the sweet and loving execution of an eternally steady 
and tranquil disposing of itself to the ultimate end of His 
own glory. In this is pure and perfect holiness ; and it will 
control the artistic selection and execution, from amid all 



454 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA. 

possible archetypal creations, to that which will be most 
worthy of His own making and accepting. There is a 
measuring of things by things, but no thing can be an ab- 
solute good. The measure of all things is in the personal 
ity of reason ; and the absolute reason is the perfection and 
glory of all possible persons ; and whatever magnifies His 
dignity will include the exaltation of finite personality. The 
supreme good for all moral personality is this unbroken 
reign of the Divine Holiness. And this grand end in all the 
works of God must secure an optimism in nature, as the 
product of His creative power. His will must be on that 
archetype which in the end of His reason is the most reason- 
able ; in the end of supreme loveliuess, is the most lovely ; 
in the end of an excellency above all price, is the most ex- 
cellent ; and in the presence of a dignity where all finite 
worth fades, is the most worthy. 

In this autocracy and autonomy of the Deity, we have 
the ultimate and complete measure of His creation. In the 
tranquil self-possession of a perfectly holy will lies his eter- 
nal purpose ; and the steady agency moves on in artistic 
wisdom, to the fulfillment of His settled counsel. Material 
worlds and systems, with their distinguishable forces as sub- 
stances in their causality, are made and arranged in their 
order and perfection of mechanical adaptation, action and 
movement ; and the rich abundance and beauty, which veg- 
etative fife throws over the surface of the green earth, are 
brought out ; and the changing seasons with the changing 
years roll on, and day and night, and " sweet return of 
morn and eve " are in perpetual alternations. But not in 
this perfection of arranged forces, though worthy of the 
power and manifold wisdom of the absolute maker, shall we 



i 



A P R I O R I COMPREHENSION OF NATURE. 455 

find the ultimate end for which the Almighty works. He is 
more than artistic perfection, and may not permit His action 
to be exhausted in the satisfaction of the artist. He is 
architect only in subserviency to a higher end in a higher 
excellency, and material worlds with all their furniture exist 
only as instruments to be used for a higher behest. Sen- 
tient tribes of living beings people these wide fields, and 
gather the good harvest of nature, and live in gladness and 
joy on this bounty, and thus in addition to the wider action 
of artistic skill in the adaptations of material, vegetable and 
animal nature, we have the much higher product of animal 
enjoyment and happiness. But God is good in the accepta- 
tion of bountiful and beneficent, only that it may subserve a 
much higher intrinsic excellency in His being, than that He 
should be benevolent. Human beings, to whom may be 
given an intelligent apprehension of that which is rule for 
their highest happiness, and an immortality, that they might 
endlessly obey and enjoy, would so far be only of nature ; 
and their rule of life, a generalization of experience as they 
found it to be ; and their obligation to obey, not any thing 
of ethical worth and dignity, but solely as slaves to a nature 
than can pay in pleasure or in pain. Their ultimate master 
would be the power of the leviathan who may caress or tor- 
ture ; and their only virtue would be that they work on 
with the eye on the greatest wages before them, and the 
consciousness of the lash behind. But God is author of the 
nature which rewards and punishes, for a much higher end 
in Himself than that so He must do if He would satisfy a 
want He finds in Himself to be made happy by making 
others happy. This would leave Him the slave to a neces- 
sity as tvrannical as that of the animal, and stretch the 



456 THE EEASON IN ITS IDEA. 

iron chain of nature completely around Him. There is here 
nowhere a will in liberty but the mere brute arbitrium of 
nature's strongest craving. The Deity should not thus ex- 
haust his action in giving laws to nature, from which the 
rules of prudence in attaining the greatest happiness on the 
whole may be derived, and this only to sit by and enjoy 
Himself the happiness, which this on-going of nature may 
work out for Him in the perceived happiness of His crea- 
tures. 

It is no possible craving want to be gratified that can be 
the ultimate end and law of the absolute power, and which 
must at once condition the absolute, and exclude from the 
prerogative of personality with a will in liberty ; but it is 
an ethical interest in reason alone, which in its own right 
demands when and how and what the happiness shall be, 
and what artistic arrangements shall be given to nature, con- 
ditioning the happiness it shall work out. God will keep 
His benevolence subservient to His holiness, and make it to 
find its end in His own worthiness, and impart happiness in 
no way that shall be derogatory to His essential excellency 
and dignity. And this discloses at once the crowning end 
of the whole physical creation, with all its sentient happi- 
ness, viz., that it may subserve a personal and moral crea- 
tion, in its advancement of virtue and holiness to such a de- 
gree of dignity and moral worth, as the ethical behest of 
His own person will admit that the absolute Author should 
secure. 

The absolute fully comprehends Himself, and fathoms all 
the depths of His own being, and has other and far higher 
capabilities than any material or sentient organizations can 
exhaust. To create and superintend the development of 



A PRIORI COMPREHENSION OF NATURE. 457 

only such forces could not reach the ultimate end of His 
own worthiness, inasmuch as it would be a termination in 
the less while He held within Himself the archetypes of 
the greater, and involve the absurdity that the absolute rea- 
son should satisfy itself with something other than reason. 
Its behest must be the maximum of archetype, and the con- 
summation of working. A moral world — a system made 
up of varied orders and ranks of persons in liberty — will be 
brought into existence ; and thus, the congeniality of accord- 
ant being, in reciprocal communion and affection, will be 
disclosed. There may then be an ethical society, governed 
by the spring which the " inward witness " of what is due 
to each in the worthiness of His own personality shall give; 
and the whole rewarding itself, in the blessedness which 
accrues to each in the holiness and blessedness of all, and 
God and His moral creation come together in a reciprocity 
of holy love. Somewhere, this moral world will be brought 
in connection with the conditions of the physical world ; 
and all the adaptations of material, vegetable, and sentient 
being be found to have their end in the interests of the 
moral system. A race of beings, compounded of the mate- 
rial, sentient and moral, may be created ; and thus that 
which is personal becomes incarnate, and the free is sub- 
jected to the colliding action of the necessitated, and per- 
sonal liberty is put upon its probation in conflict with the 
conditioned force of nature, and through this one point of 
connection with nature, a modifying influence is consequently 
carried over all the sphere of moral being. God will use 
the natural for the ends of the moral ; and he will govern 
the moral, by ethical laws and influences which originate 

in the behest of his own intrinsic excellency and dignity. 

20 



i 



458 THE REASON IN ITS IDEA, 

When the ends of nature are kept wholly subordinate to 
the ethical end of personality, then are the physical and the 
moral worlds in harmony, and the entire creation of God is 
good, and " the morning stars sing together." 

Sin may enter by any prostitution of an ethical claim to 
a physical want, or by any assumption of the finite reason 
above its proportionate excellency, and become a soul-sin, 
but this must be somewhere below the Creator, and from 
the creature-personality .; inasmuch as no colliding want can 
reach to the absolute, and sin enter through him ; and no 
moral responsibility to an " inner witness" can be found in 
physical nature, and sin inhere in it. Through any finite 
personality sin may come in ; and that it should come in 
somewhere, in any possible modification of a moral system 
in its necessary subjection to a conditioned nature, may be 
a certainty to the omniscience of the absolute, except in 
such interposition for prevention as would compromit the 
higher ultimate end in the behest of his own dignity. God 
may not lay aside his own dignity, and act unworthy of his 
own excellency, to save a moral creation from ruin. He 
may not leave the throne of sovereignty, ethically his in his 
own intrinsic excellency, and permit himself to be used as a 
servant and instrument for some other end that then takes 
the throne ; even though it be the holiness and blessedness 
of a moral universe. What he may do, he will do to ex- 
clude sin ; both in the use of sentient nature as a penalty, 
and when sin has entered, in its use as a tabernacle for di- 
vinity to "set forth a propitiation, to declare his righteous- 
ness ;" but not for the prevention of nor the redemption 
from sin will God " deny himself." He will so create nat- 
ural and moral worlds, and so arrange them in their connec- 



A PEIOEI COMPREHENSION OF NATURE. 450 

tions, and so act upon them in all his agency, as shall com- 
pletely meet the end of his own worthiness ; and give that 
archetype as the pattern for artistic wisdom, which, of all 
possible ways for creating energy and governmental influ- 
ence to go forth, shall be most reasonable, most lovely, most 
righteous and holy, when tried in his presence, and by the 
ethical rights and claims of his own personality. This must 
comprehend every event hi nature, every act in the moral 
world, and conclude the entire creation in that final consum- 
mation of the whole plan and work, when it shall be worthy 
to be presented to, and accepted by the God and Judge of 
all. Then shall come the full and eternal chorus, " and 
every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and 
under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are 
in them, shall be heard saying, Blessing and honor and 
glory and power be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, 
and unto the Lamb for ever and ever." 

Here, therefore, in the complete ideal of the absolute in 
personality, it is possible that we may attain to a perfect 
and entire comprehension of nature, and indeed of all crea- 
tion physical and moral. A nature of things may originate 
in the Deity as personal creator in liberty, and stand out 
distinct from, and wholly excluded from all conditioning 
reaction upon, the Deity; while itself is dependent upon, 
and subjected to, his supreme will. We no longer seek 
a resting place through the discursions of the under- 
standing, where we must ever be hastening the foot- 
step from the conditioned to a higher condition ; but we 
have found a conception for a safe and permanent source of 
all things, in the self-sufficiency of an absolute, personal 
Deity. Nor do we run on the interminable line of final 



460 THE EEASON IN ITS IDEA. 

causes, and find one thing to end only in that which must 
yet run on to some further end ; but we have a summum 
bonum, and ultimate end, in the intrinsic worth and rever- 
ence due to the absolute personal God, before whom all his 
creation should stand uncovered. The chain of nature's 
conditioned events may lengthen down the depths of the 
void below, but the hand out of which it comes forbids all 
anxiety .lest unsupported it should fill, and nature be extin- 
guished ; or, lest it should go on downward with no aim 
but to lose itself in unfathomed emptiness. Nature has a 
beginning ; a guide ; a consummation ; and in this, nature is 
completely comprehended; nor is it possible that in any 
other manner, it should find its comprehension. 

The complete Idea of the Reason, as faculty for an ope- 
ration of Comprehension, is thus given in the compass of 
the Absolute in personality. Nature may be comprehended 
in a pure Spontaneity, Autonomy, and Liberty : or, which 
is the same thing — Reason may comprehend Nature in the 
compass of an Absolute Person, 



CHAPTER II. 

THE REASON IN ITS OBJECTIVE LAW. 



FINITE AND ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY. 

Comprehension determines things in their origin and 
their consummation, and which we have already seen is 
only to be effected through a free personality. Sense can 
merely conjoin in definite place and period, and thereby 
give in consciousness the arising and departing phenome- 
non; but can not tell whence it cometh, nor whither it 
goeth. An understanding can merely connect the phenom- 
ena in their substances and causes, and thereby give to the 
flowing events in nature a perduring substratum of exist- 
ence which ever is, and only changes its modes of being and 
manifestation ; bat can not say, what is origin for this sub- 
stance in its causality, nor to what consummation these 
changes in nature are tending. It may go up and down the 
interminable series of changing events, but can by no means 
overleap the linked conditions and determine from whence 
the whole have come, nor whither the whole will find their 
end ; and in such perpetual running from link to link there 
can never be effected a comprehension of the entire chain. 



462 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

The reason is the only faculty for comprehending, and this 
by encompassing both origin and end in a personal author. 

We have determined the a priori possibility of such 
comprehending operation, in the compass of a personality in 
liberty,' and in this have attained to the complete idea of an 
all-embracing reason. But thus far, the all-comprehending 
reason is only a void conception. We have not yet found 
such a comprehending faculty in actual being and operation. 
So it may be ; so, if at all, it must be ; but that so it t>, we 
have yet to find. Our remaining task is this, that we take 
any facts which may present themselves in the whole field 
of a comprehending agency and find whether they come at 
once within the actual colligation of this law of free person- 
ality. It is incumbent, that from these various facts, we 
should show that a comprehension of things reaches so far 
as, and no farther than, an applied law of personality in lib- 
erty reaches. This will give the accordance of Idea and 
Law which has all along been our criterion of true science. 
This Avill perfect our entire Psychological System ; but as in 
the sense and the understanding we gave an outline of the 
Ontological Demonstration of their objects, we will here do 
the same for the objects of the reason — The Soul, God, and 
Immortality. 

We shall find an occasion for distinguishing these facts 
of a comprehending agency and putting them into two sep- 
arate classes, accordingly as they belong to a world of a 
finite or of an absolute personality. 

We shall find that a finite personality is the compass by 
which we comprehend one class of these facts, and the abso- 
lute personality the compass by which we comprehend the 
other ; and to mark the distinction between these, it is in> 



FINITE AND ABSOLUTE PEESONALITY. 463 

portant that we familiarize ourselves to the following con- 
siderations. 

We may speak of a sensorium, reached by any content 
as quality given in an organ of sense, and thus excited, 
becoming capacity for sensation ; and all this will lie wholly 
within the fixed conditions of nature ; and the phenomena 
which it will give occasion for constructing in consciousness, 
and thus all perceptions, will stand wholly within necessitated 
conditions. We may also speak of a sensory as more deeply 
subjective, reached by the perceived objects. and thus excited 
becoming capacity for appetite in any way of a constitu- 
tional craving or want, and all this will be within the linked 
conditions of nature ; and the desires, as well as percep- 
tions, will be necessitated. The entire sensibility, call it 
sensorium or sensory, capacity for perceiving or wanting, is 
wholly within nature. 

The perceptions of objects may vary, and remembered 
consequences of former gratifications may modify desires, 
and changed circumstances may demand a changed course 
of action to secure the object wanted, and all this will induce 
a judgment relative to the ends of a sentient nature accord- 
ing to what is actually given in the sense, and which must 
thus change as the perceived circumstances and wants have 
changed ; but all this will still be controlled wholly by the 
conditions of nature, and an animal understanding will be 
mere instinctive subtlety or brute sagacity, and held com- 
pletely in servitude to the conditions imposed upon it. Even 
should we admit a generalizing of all experience, and there- 
by a rule of highest gratification in the aggregate, and in 
this the dictate of prudence ; the whole would still be within 
the bondage of necessity, and the perception and the appe- 



464 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

tite and the judgment all conditioned in nature, and no other 
prerogative would be gained than a mere expansion of an 
animal understanding necessitated in all its judgments, its 
wants, and its gratifications. Its aggregate want in its pru- 
dential judgment Avould be conditioned and would itself con- 
dition the act to gratify, as truly as in the craving of parti- 
cular appetites. In no way can the merely sentient force 
rise above nature. 

Man has within him, all the distinguishable forces of 
material being ; and, as material, is conditioned in nature as 
truly as the clods on which he treads. He has also animal 
life ; yet this, in the furthest extension of sentient wants 
and sentient gratifications, and in the highest generalizations 
of consequences in an attained experience, gives to him no 
prerogatives above his fellows of the stall or of the stye ; 
but he, equally with all animal nature, is wrapped about^ by 
the iron chain of necessitated successions. The degree is 
nothing but a consideration of a longer or a shorter chain ; 
the kind of connections, as animal, in man and in brute is 
the same. We have in nature, throughout, a superinducing 
of distinguishable forces one upon another, the last using 
the former for its own ends, yet itself still held in all the 
conditions of the former but as it overrules without extin- 
guishing them ; and in this, different grades of space-filling 
substances are given, while all are ensphered about a com- 
mon center, the whole of which is the physical universe, 
bound every where in conditions which make it a fixed 
nature of things through its perpetual development. 

And, again, in contradiction to the physical we have the 
ethical world. The intrinsic excellency of the absolute is 
the central law of the moral universe. The spirit of G-od 



FINITE AND ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY. 465 

knoweth perfectly what is in God, and this inner witness of 
his own excellency and dignity is the consciousness of his 
own right, and what alone is worthy of him, and is thus 
inner law as a divine conscience in the autonomy of his own 
being. In this is also an ethical spring for the direction of 
Iris own agency, and in this self-determining capacity lies the 
Divine will. And as, moreover, there is in this will, self- 
determined in the right of his own excellency, an alternative 
to any other end which can be presented, than his own dig- 
nity, so there is here a will in liberty. This determines per- 
sonality to the Deity; and as ever self-determined in self- 
complacency, with no colliding ends to disturb the perpetual 
tranquillity, we have in this, properly, the Holy and the 

EVER BLESSED GOD. 

Man, as spiritual, is the offspring of the Deity, and 
although only finite rationality is yet in the very likeness of 
the absolute reason. To every finite spirit there is the inward 
witness of its own intrinsic dignity and excellence,, and thus 
a knowledge of what is worthy of itself in its own righteous 
claim, and thereby a conscience as law within written on the 
heart. In this is spring for an alternative to any colliding 
end that may come before the man, and thus a will in liberty 
is his endowment. The yielding of the good will to any 
colliding end whatever is a degrading servitude, and makes 
it to be a depraved will ; and the valorous beating back and 
holding in subjection every want of nature to the worthi- 
ness of the spiritual, becomes the virtuous will. The will 
of the holy God and of the virtuous man are directed' by 
the same principle, the intrinsic excellency and dignity of 
the spiritual ; and the inner witness differs only in this, that 
in God it is an absolute reason and in man it is a finite ration- 

20* 



466 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

ality, which in its excellence gives energy to conscience. 
The will of God, in whatever way made known to man, 
Avill thus come to his conscience as the right of the absolute, 
and which it will be imperative that he should obey on the 
ground that the finite excellency can not otherwise maintain 
its own worthiness, but must really debase itself by any 
rebellion against the absolute, and bring the conviction of 
degradation and guilt to its own conscience ; and where there 
is this disobedience of the finite, it will behoove that the 
absolute inflict penalty on the ground that thus he should 
vindicate his own dignity, and sustain a worthiness that 
must be reverenced. 

The intrinsic excellence of rational spirit is every where 
end and law, and the inward witness of what is its right is 
the ultimate right ; and every where holds all personality 
responsible each to his own conscience. The absolute right 
includes the finite, and in this harmonizes all possible ethical 
claim through all possible persons, and makes of all possible 
grades of spiritual being an ensphered moral universe. Any 
part acts unworthy of itself and in violation of the right of 
the whole, when any colliding want carries the will in servi- 
tude to it; and the vindictive penalty for such violation 
must be made to meet every sinner, through his own con- 
science. In this, we have an ensphered moral world, held 
together by the law of liberty, as the ensphered physical 
world is held together by the law of conditioning forces; 
and these two spheres meeting and intersecting in man. So 
far as man is only material or animal he is wholly nature, so 
far as he is purely spiritual he is wholly supernatural ; but 
as the two spheres of nature and of rational spirit come 
together in man, and thus make him to be neither mere ani- 



FINITE AND ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY. 467 

mal nor pure spirit, we have that complex existence which 
we call a human being. So much of the natural as is thus 
put in combination with the rational, constitutes that which, 
as entire, we properly term the world of humanity. The law 
of the sentient in this world of humanity is wholly of nature, 
and may be called appetitive ; the law of the spiritual is 
wholly of reason, and may be known as imperative. 

And now, our object is to gather these facts where there 
is any comprehension of things in their origin and end, and 
see whether they may all be held in colligation by this hypo- 
thesis of a free personality. In nature Ave shall not expect 
to find such facts of a comprehending agency on this hypo- 
thesis, inasmuch as in nature there can be no free personality. 
Within the field of humanity, inasmuch as we now assume 
that it is not all nature, we may expect to find some facts to 
be comprehended in the free though finite personality with 
which humanity is endowed. But in the broad field encom- 
passed by Divinity, we must anticipate the most satisfactory 
instances of an all-embracing reason, as practicable and 
actual only through a manifest application of the law of an 
absolute personality in liberty. If we find the comprehen- 
sion to be only as we apply the free personality, and always 
when we do so, and precisely to the degree in which we are 
able to do so, it will prove itself to be the actual law, hold- 
ing all facts of a comprehending reason in colligation by 
virtue of its own universality. We shall thus need two 
Sections for the classification of facts under the finite^ and 
under the absolute personality in liberty. 



468 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 



SECTION I . 

THE FACTS OP A COMPREHENDING REASON WHICH COME 
WITHIN THE COMPASS OF A FINITE PERSONALITY. 

Humanity in its sentient nature comprehends nothing, 
and only as it rises within the sphere of the rational, and 
stands out in the prerogatives of its free personality, can it 
possess the conditioning law for all comprehension. The 
perceptions and wants and judgments are wholly enchained 
in the prison-house of nature, and all intelligence circum- 
scribed and concluded with no comprehensive capacity ; and 
only as man awakes in the higher consciousness of rational- 
ity and freedom does he know, or even dream of or care for, 
any existence beyond his dungeon, or have any impulse to 
inquire what he or his prison of nature is. But we have 
assumed for man the prerogative of a spiritual being, and in 
virtue of a free personality habitant in humanity, we are 
now to induce a variety of facts in this field, which will 
evince for themselves the actual law of freedom as the only 
hypothesis by which they may be brought in colligation. 
These facts of a comprehending capacity will, indeed, in- 
clude all that distinguishes man from brute, inasmuch as it 
is only in that which is elementary in his personality that 
any discrimination of an order of being can be made. In 
virtue of this only is it that he can rise above nature and 
comprehend his own operations and products, while the 
brute is all nature and can comprehend nothing. 

But, for the clear apprehension of the degrees of free- 
dom, and the peculiar springs which may give an alternative 



FACTS IN FINITE PERSONALITY. 469 

to sentient wants, in the finite personality which inhabits 
every human breast, it is important that we attain the pecu- 
liarities of the world of humanity, as lying solely in that 
region which is formed by the mutual intersection of the 
two spheres of the physical and the ethical systems. This 
intersection, and consequent mutual interaction and compo- 
sition of the two, modifies each ; and thus, neither the phys- 
ical nor the ethical is as it would be in its separate existence. 
The sentient force does not act alone, but has the influence 
upon it of the rational power ; the rational spirit is not in- 
corporeal, but is subjected to the colliding desires of the 
sense. There may thus be modifications, and mediate de- 
grees of freedom, between the utterly conditioned in the 
merely sentient nature, and the unruffled calm in a purely 
holy ethical agency. How this may be, it is not difficult to 
trace ; and it is directly in the way of preparation for the 
attaining and classifying of our contemplated facts of a com- 
prehending agency, that we show the discriminating points 
in the different springs, which in its rational interest may 
give to humanity a freedom from the bondage of its sen- 
tient wants. 

The craving in the wants of sentient life, solely consid- 
ered, Ave have termed appetite; and under this we include 
all the constitutional sentient cravings though sometimes 
called by softer names, as sympathies, affections, etc. When 
the force of excited appetite is toward gratification, it is 
known as desire ; when it is turned away from its object in 
disgust it is known as aversion. But without further dis- 
crimination, it may be sufficient to let the whole of condi- 
tioned sentient nature be known as appetitive. On the 
other hand in the ethical world, the claims which an inner 



470 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

witness of the intrinsic dignity of rational personality pos- 
sesses in its own right, we have termed behests ; and as in- 
clusive of all pure personality, whether of the absolute or 
the finite, it may be sufficient here that we speak of all 
purely ethical being as in its own right imperative. 

In the sentient nature, every thing works for wages. It 
is conditioned in the happiness it wants, and in the way to 
attain it ; and it must work, and work in such a manner, or 
starve. Its highest law is gratification of want, called love 
of happiness, and is wholly of physical necessity. On the 
other hand in the rational personality, all acts in compla- 
cency. It is pleased with the behest, for it is its own, and 
in the right of its own excellency ; it is tranquil in its action, 
for no colliding end disturbs it. Its highest law of action is 
the inward witness of its own dignity, called love of right, 
and is wholly liberty in its own lawfulness. The sentient 
works as means to an end imposed upon it, and is worth so 
much as nature pays for it in gratification ; the personal acts 
in its own right and blesses itself in its own worthiness, and 
has no price in barter but a dignity to which it were the 
highest affront to offer any thing in exchange. The sentient 
satiates itself and rests in a surfeit ; the rational maintains 
its dignity, and has the tranquil bliss of unwearied holiness. 

When, now, we have the two spheres in mutual inter- 
section, and spirituality given incarnate as in humanity, to 
the full extent of this intersection must we have reciprocal 
modification, and by so much must the experience of human- 
ity differ from mere sense or from pure reason. It will not 
be all animal and thus wholly the brute, nor will it be all 
spiritual and thus wholly the divine. It will have both a 
price and a dignity ; a law of happiness and a law of right- 



FACTS IN FINITE PERSONALITY. 471 

eousness ; an appetitive nature and an imperative personal- 
ity. And here, between the solely appetitive in the animal 
and the purely imperative in the spiritual, is the region of 
humanity compounded of both. Such a complex existence 
may well give rise to that in an experience which is neither 
a craving want nor an ethical behest ; but which may be 
spring for action alternative to any thing of the sentient, 
and thus give a modification of freedom, though it be not in 
the claim of a moral right. And such a spring may vary in 
successive modifications, according as the rational makes 
use of the lower or the higher elements in the sentient for 
its own ends. To just such an extent may humanity be- 
come creative, and make and enjoy its own products in its 
own sphere, and thus so far be comprehending agency be- 
cause so far it may originate and consummate as author and 
designer. In such creations there will not be work as in the 
service of the sense, nor will there be the holy tranquillity 
as in the pure ethical activity of the spirit ; but in propor- 
tion as it is spirit using sense for the ends of its own ration- 
ality, and thus controlling and not controlled, there may be 
a serene interest that rises as the product rises in the ends 
of the reason, and carrying humanity from the very confines 
of the animal in savage life upwards in culture to the bor- 
der of the ethical, which controls every faculty in duty and 
for the dignity of the rational personality. This impulse in 
humanity which is neither that of craving appetite in the 
sense nor of sovereign behest in the spirit, but a serene in- 
terest in some end in the reason, has been termed the play- 
impulse ; inasmuch as on one side there is no servility, and 
on the other there is no reverence. The reason uses its con- 
nection with the sense, not for any end of the sense ; not in 



472 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

the ethical behest of its own dignity ; but simply in the in- 
terest of its own cheerfulness. It plays with nature, not in 
frivolity as a sense-play ; but with the elevating and invigor- 
ating exercise of a sportive rationality. It is this impulse, 
which takes us from sensuality, and raises us through the 
beauty of art, and the truth of science, up to the duties of 
morality and the sanctities of religion. We play with 
beauty, and cheer ourselves with the pursuit of truth, and 
thus lift ourselves above the slavery of appetite, and are 
prepared for the ethical claims upon our personality, either 
in duty or in adoration. The free personality is present in 
art and science, as truly as in morality. 

Having thus indicated the region in humanity from 
which we are to gather the facts which have their compre- 
hension in its free personality, we shall now, at once, enter 
on the work of induction, and having reference only to such 
as come within the compass of a finite personality, we will 
make it sufficiently broad to show that we have the opera- 
tions of a comprehending reason in humanity, and that it is 
every where, and only, through the freedom of that which 
is rational and personal. We shall classify them under the 
several heads indicated by the different interests which give 
their spring to the producing agency. 

1. JEsthetic facts. — The merely animal sentient nature 
finds that which is agreeable in all the five senses. There is 
the appetitive force inducing a craving for its object of grat- 
ification in them all. The agreeable sensations from temper- 
ature, odors, and viands, as merely animal, will be more in- 
tensely appetitive than colors and sounds ; and thus the 
senses of feeling, smelling, and tasting, are more important, 
as sources of gratification, to the animal than seeing and 



PACTS IN FINITE PERSONALITY. 473 

hearing. Doubtless, also, the mere animal may re-produce, 
in a dreaming fancy other than distinct memory, the fictions 
of past sensations, and so far live in the enjoyment of fan- 
cied happiness ; and in such a world of the animal fancy, it 
is just as little to be doubted that feelings, smells and tastes 
will have an ascendency, as fictions, quite as decidedly over 
sounds and sights, as they have in actual animal gratifica- 
tion. Let the animal nature do what it may, in actual grat- 
ification or fancy, and it will obey the conditions of appetite. 
But, we find this remarkable fact in humanity, that the 
two senses least intensely appetitive are the sole media 
through which the play-impulse can be at all reached. 
Sights and sounds have ever their definite outlines, and we 
can give shape to the color and form in tune to the sound. 
It is not so much the object seen and heard, as the form in 
which it appears that interests us. Our pleasure is not in 
the matter, but in the form in which the matter comes to 
us. Nor is it every form that pleases, much less that it is 
mere form ; it must be such form as may blend with life, 
and figure to the mind some in-dwelling emotion. It must 
touch some chord of sentient life, and awaken sentiment, 
and is thus aesthetic. Its life is sentimental. The murmur 
of the waterfall, the sighing of the wind, the very silence 
of the night, must all put on a living form ; and the land- 
scape, the fountain, the sky, the rosy dawn or crimson eve, 
must all glow with an inner life, and the form be vitalized 
and not some dry and dead husks, which life has thrown 
aside as its mere exuviae. Not that there is life ; not that 
there is form ; but that there is life in form, that there is 
living form, is there beauty. This is every where in nature, 
coming to man as a perpetual visitant through the eye and 



474 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

ear, yea, as a constant presence where we have but to awake 
in consciousness and find ourselves ever gladdened by it. 

" There's beauty all around our paths, 
If but our watchful eyes, 
Can trace it midst familiar things, 
And through their lowly guise." 

All this, though in nature, is as nothing to the mere ani- 
mal. Humanity finds it, separates the mere matter from it, 
and has the beauty of nature in its pure living forms as 
objective to daily contemplation. But much more than this. 
Humanity is not restricted to beauty as nature gives it ; the 
whole world of art belongs to man, and he may fill it with 
his own living forms of beauty. Here lies his aesthetic 
power. He may not only find what beauty nature has, and 
take it purified from nature and make it his own ; but he can 
create for himself a beauty more perfect than nature any 
where can give to him, and put his own Apollos into nature, 
and from his own perfect ideal beauty criticise the beauty of 
both nature and art. He plays with nature, with his own 
productions of the pencil and the chisel, and sports in a sub- 
jective ideal world of beauty more rich and glowing in its 
living forms than matter can any where take upon itself, and 
his inner ear hears music, and his inner eye sees blended 
color and shape in living expression, which no combinations 
or sublimations of matter may convey to outer hearing or 
sight. How completely can he include all that is or may be, 
in any general class of beauty " in earth or sky or human 
form or face divine," within his more complete ideal arche- 
type ! How effectually comprehend both nature and art, as 
made objective, in his all-encompassing subjective creations ! 
Here are all the facts of an aesthetic comprehension, on which 



FACTS IN FINITE PERSONALITY. 475 

we need not longer dwell, and whose particulars we need 
not minutely recapitulate, and the only inquiry important for 
us now, though in the midst of so much to interest, is simply 
for the law which holds all these facts in colligation. Whence 
the spring and interest in this play-impulse ? arid how does 
humanity comprehend its own apart from nature, and draw 
the encompassing line around the world of art ? And how 
say that nature, in all her forms of beauty, is yet included 
in the more complete aesthetic world ? All this it is not dif- 
ficult to answer, and the answer reveals the law which holds 
in colligation all the facts' of an aesthetic comprehension. 

Take from humanity its free personality, and leave all 
that is animal unweakened and unrestrained in its sentient 
force, and you will have simply the agreeable — the appetitive 
want and the conforming gratification. Put the rational 
into humanity, that it may separate the living form from the 
material in nature, and you will have the beautiful — the 
serene interest in and the cheering contemplation of reason 
upon, its rational forms, which express sentient life. Shut 
this rational up so completely within nature, that it must go 
only to the forms in nature for its beauty, and take what 
nature has, and satisfy itself with what nature gives, and 
you have imprisoned it within nature and bound it in servi- 
tude to nature ; and now, although you can not quench its 
interest in beauty above all appetite, yet you compel it to 
drudge in nature and work on nature's conditions for nature's 
wages, and it is cheerful play-impulse no longer. But, merely 
let the sphere of the rational intersect the sphere of the phy- 
sical, and while the rational and the animal are compounded 
in humanity, let the rational have its own pure sphere stretch- 
ing away beyond all intersection with the physical ; and thus, 



476 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

that the rational can both act within nature and elevate itself 
above nature ; and either find nature's own beautiful form or 
put its own, impressed upon the material as art, within 
nature ; or, in the productive imagination, blend its own 
forms amid the colors and sounds of nature ; or, quite away 
from nature create its own pure ideals in its own subjective 
being ; and in all this, you have a free personality, which 
comes within and excludes itself from nature at its pleasure, 
and may make nature its play-ground and not its work- 
shop. 

And such is manifestly the aesthetic law of humanity — a 
law of liberty in personality. Beauty must dwell in living 
forms ; and must be contemplated to be known ; and so far 
the world of beauty is conditioned to space and time, and 
there can not be an absolute beauty. But humanity is not 
shut up to nature for its beauty. It can create its own ; and 
judge nature's beauty by its own ; and put its own, as art, 
into nature, or keep it as subjective ideal out of nature ; and 
separate its own from nature, and comprehend its own as ori- 
ginated and consummated in its own action ; and can encom- 
pass nature's beauty by the greater completeness of its own 
expressed sentiment. Humanity is thus aesthetic compre- 
hension, solely from the prerogative of its free personality. 

2. Mathematical Facts. — Humanity is competent to ful- 
fill all the claims of a pure mathematical science. Man con- 
structs particular diagrams, and in a process of intuition 
attains universal demonstrations. That this can not be in 
virtue of the animal element of his being is sufficiently mani- 
fest from the fact that no animal, however sagacious in con- 
cluding from experience, ever rises to the most simple intui- 
tions in the region of pure mathematical science. We may 



FACTS IN FINITE PERSONALITY* 477 

soon determine why this must be so ; inasmuch as nothing 
of the sphere of the rational comes within the sensual nature 
of the sphere, and there is no free personality that capaci- 
tates for d priori constructions in which may be found uni- 
versal demonstrations. 

The brute constructs the content in the sensibility into a 
phenomenon as perfectly as man, and in some cases of animal 
vision the perception is more acute and minutely exact than 
through the human organ. To the mere animal, there may 
thus be all the empirical intuitions of greater and less, con- 
tainer and contained, like and unlike, etc. ; and the capacity 
to change the outward action, from a change in the percep- 
tions, may be within the endowment of mere brute nature. 
There may be widely different degrees of brute sagacity, 
from a less or more restricted capacity to judge according 
to sense, but in the highest exhibitions of it, the whole will 
stop within the empirical intuition, and can never reach the 
region of pure intuition. The animal judgment controls no 
further than taught by sense in experience, and can use only 
what it perceives or remembers ; but can construct no pure 
diagrams in which an a priori necessity and universality is 
attained, and from which alone pure mathematical demon- 
stration can be educed. 

Man, on the other hand, constructs his pure forms, not 
at all as the copies from perceived or remembered phenom- 
ena, but perfect and complete beyond what any experience 
can attain ; and these pure figures he combines in varied 
diagrams according to the purposes of the demonstration, 
and in these combined pure figures he carries his intuition 
onward step by step, till he attains his conclusion. Nor is it 
at all necessary that he should construct new diagrams and 



478 THE REASON IX ITS LAW. 

attain new conclusions for every particular of a class, nor 
even to so multiply them as to deduce a general rule from 
the many examples ; his one demonstration is as conclusive 
for the universal as for the particular. When he has con- 
structed three points in the same plane in pure space, he has 
not only this intuition that these three points are in the same 
plane, but his diagram is quite sufficient also for the intuition 
in a universal axiom, that any three points in space must ever 
lie in the same plane. Once, to demonstrate the three angles 
of a triangle to be together equal to two right angles, is a 
demonstration in the particular conclusive for the universal. 
And here man may multiply his diagrams and enlarge the 
field of his mathematical demonstrations, and his mathematical 
science will be comprehended within his constructions and 
the intuitive processes through which he passes to his con- 
clusions. Men may widely differ as mathematicians, but in 
all cases their mathematical science is as their constructed 
diagrams and their completed processes of intuition. And' 
so of humanity entire, we can say, that it is mathematician 
in so far as it constructs pure diagrams and completes the 
processes of distinct intuitions. We have the facts of a com- 
prehending agency in this field of mathematical science, but 
the comprehension is only in this, that an intellectual agency 
constructs the particular diagram, and a process of intuition 
attains the conclusion which, in that class, is universal demon- 
stration. Humanity comprehends itself as mathematician in 
its capacity for pure construction and intuition that embraces 
universals. 

And now, this whole law of mathematical comprehension 
is manifestly nothing other than that of free personality in 
humanity. An interest of reason for mathematical truth is 



FACTS IK FINITE PEESONALITT, 479 

adequate spring for all mathematical construction and com- 
pleting of the process of intuition, without any interference 
from any want in a sensory, and even against, and above, 
and in opposition to all such wants. The mathematician 
may regard wholly the ends of sense, and make his science 
wholly subservient to the agreeable in human wants ; but he 
is then a servant to his sentient nature, and is working for 
wages. He may have an ethical claim, which involves the 
worthiness of his moral character ; and his mathematical 
study will then be loyalty to the claims of duty. But he 
may also have only the end of mathematical truth, and his 
whole action be prompted and directed, purely in the inter- 
est of reason, for science ; and in such case, the spring though 
not an imperative is manifestly also not appetitive. It is a 
love of mathematical truth, and prompts to action in mathe- 
matical demonstration solely for the truth's sake. It is of 
the same class as in art, though a more serious and grave 
employment than in the reason's play with the beautiful. 
There is not the servile drudgery as in working for the wages 
of sense, though the activity does not rise to the dignity and 
holiness of an ethical imperative in its own right. It gives 
freedom from the necessity of nature. It has the spring of 
the serene interest in the play-impulse, and can take an alter- 
native to all the ends of a sentient nature, and in its own 
freedom originate its pure diagrams from itself, and go 
through the processes of its intuitions in the rational love to 
science as the end of its demonstrations ; and in this free- 
dom of the rational is found the only compass by which to 
determine to each person, and to all humanity, the compre- 
hending of its mathematical science. The diagram must be 
in some diversity of the pure space and time, but it is wholly 



480 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

indifferent what diversity in the pure space and time ; it may 
be in the one whole of space and time with nature, or in 
any mirrored space, or in any purely subjective space in the 
primitive intuition ; but in all cases the person's own free 
constructions and intuitions will be comprehensive of all his 
mathematics. He neither measures nor copies nature as his 
pattern, but makes his own perfect lines and angles and cir- 
cles, and asks no want in the sense to condition his action 
and hire or drive him to his work ; but he freely engages in 
it, in the cheerfulness of its own interest. 

3. Philosophical Facts. — The animal may be philosopher 
to this extent, that in the experience of antecedent and con- 
sequent in the flowing events of time there may be appre- 
hended a successive connection and orderly ongoing of 
nature. A generalization of this experience may give the 
rule for anticipating what is coming, and the dictate to shape 
the conduct accordingly, in proportion to the number of 
facts which may be gathered within the induction. But to 
whatever extent of sagacity such a force might reach, it 
would be bound in nature and subjected utterly to the 
conditions of a necessitated experience. Pure philosophy 
reaches much higher than this, and determines the physical 
forces which must condition all sequences, and bind nature 
together in one universe and one orderly and already condi- 
tioned method of development. It apprehends nature not 
merely as from experience that so it is, but from the higher 
point of its a priori conditions that so it must be. Nature 
is apprehended in its physical laws ; and it is thus seen that 
these condition each event in its own place in the flowing 
sequences, and fix it to both its place in space and its period 
in time, and that they thereby determine a whole of space 



FACTS IN FINITE PERSONALITY. 481 

and of time, and not mere appearance in coming and depart- 
ing phenomena each in its separate place and period. It takes 
force, as in any possible substances and causes, and deter- 
mines what is truth in reference to any possible nature of 
things. All possible nature must be determinable in its place 
in a whole of space, and in its period in a whole of time ; 
and in order to this the phenomenal qualities and events 
must stand in a permanent substance, come out of a perdur- 
ing source, and connect themselves through successive causes 
and concomitant reciprocal influences. This is not only what 
a particularly existing nature is, but what all possible nature, 
as determinable in space and time, must be. A pure phil- 
osophy is thus as comprehensive as pure mathematics. The 
mathematician comprehends in one intuition, all that may in 
any way have place and period ; the philosopher compre- 
hends in one discursion, all that may in any way have deter- 
minable place and period in a whole of space and of time. 
All sensation, that is to be phenomenon in place and period, 
must be definitely conjoined; and all phenomenon, that is 
to be nature in a whole of space and time, must be connected 
in substances and causes. Humanity has thus the compre- 
hension of nature in a philosophy, as truly as the compre- 
hension of forms in a mathematical science. We have a 
universal truth of physical principles, as completely as a uni- 
versal truth of mathematical demonstrations. We know 
what physical force is, as comprehensively as we know what 
mathematical form is ; viz., that what is demonstrated in? 
each, to be true in the particular, is therein a demonstrated 
truth for the universal ; so that we may as conclusively affirm 
— like causes must universally produce like effects, and that 
action and reaction must universally be equal ; as that any 

21 



482 THE EEASON IN ITS LAW. 

three points must be universally in the same plane, or that 
the three angles of any triangle must universally be together 
equal to two right angles. Humanity as philosopher con- 
cludes with equal necessity and universality that humanity as 
mathematician does. 

And, here, precisely the same principles apply, as above 
in the case of mathematical comprehensiveness. There is 
the serene interest of the play-impulse, as spring in philoso- 
phy, as really as in mathematical science. The philosopher 
may be slave to sense, and work for pay ; or loyal subject to 
an ethical sovereign, and act from duty ; but, he may also 
from pure love of philosophical truth push on his investiga- 
tion, and live, and act indifferent to all the ends of sense, 
and solely in the serene interest of philosophizing freely for 
the science's sake. And here, it is only in the capacity to 
rise into this region of the free personality, that humanity is 
competent to comprehend its own philosophy. Just so far 
as it attains the conception of physical forces, and makes its 
discursions from phenomenon to phenomenon through them, 
as the substances and causes which connect all together, it 
has a demonstrated natural philosophy ; and only so far as 
this reaches, can it conclude in any judgments beyond its 
own experience. Each man builds his own philosophy, by 
his own notional conceptions of the substances and causes 
he uses for connecting events ; and we can comprehend each 
man's philosophy, or each man can comprehend his own 
philosophy, or any comprehension can be made of the phil- 
osophy of humanity generally, only as the free personality, 
in every case, is made the compass for originating and con- 
summating the entire connections of the philosophical sys- 
tem. If he only takes nature, as experience gives it to him ; 



PACTS IN FINITE PERSONALITY. 483 

he has it just as the animal has it, and is simply an empiric : 
if he has his own conception of substances and causes as 
primitive forces, and makes his own discursions through these 
to his conclusions in a systematic judgment ; then has he a 
philosophy which is his own as belonging to the universal 
reason, and is comprehended only as his in these free con- 
ceptions, and discursions of his own rational being. All 
philosophy is mere particular fact and not universal truth, 
except in the free personality. 

4. Psychological Facts. — In our animal sentient nature, 
we may have a psychology which reaches over the whole 
field of our conscious experience. The phenomena of the 
internal sense may be singly apprehended, and even a broad 
induction of such remembered experiences may be made 
and generalized and classified, by an understanding judging 
only by sense. But if all experience could be thus general- 
ized, it would simply give us a psychology as a fact, and ca- 
pacitate us to affirm that so experience in consciousness is ; 
but we could not thus attain any a priori conditions for 
these mental facts, and determine that so universally human 
consciousness must be. We should have no universal truth 
in the operations of mind, and thus no rational psychologi- 
cal science. 

But, humanity is competent to reach an a priori field, 
quite above and conditional for all consciousness. The pure 
diversity in space and time can be taken in the reason, and 
the whole operation of conjunction in all possible definite 
form be determined. And also the conditional space-filling 
and time-abiding force, as substance and cause, can be taken 
in the reason, and all possible operation of connecting events 
in a nature of things be determined. And once more, the 



484 TIIE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

ideal of the absolute may be attained in the reason, and all 
possible operation of comprehending nature thereby deter- 
mined. The entire field of intellectual action is thus brought 
within its a priori conditions, and we have a psychology, 
not , from experience merely, but rationally demonstrated 
and determining how experience itself is possible. Each 
man has thus his psychology so 'far forth, and only so far 
forth, as he has attained the primitive elements of these in- 
tellectual operations of conjunction, connection, and compre- 
hension, and determined their ideal possibility ; and human- 
ity in general comprehends just so much of psychological 
science, as has been a priori determined in these operations 
conditional for all intellectual cognition. All possible intel- 
lectual apprehension lies before humanity, and by so much 
as human investigation has already reached, has humanity 
acquired a true science of mind. 

We have, therefore, the same law for the facts of com- 
prehension in psychological science, that we have before 
found for comprehension in philosophy, mathematics, and 
esthetics. Only in the free personality, above and quite in- 
dependent of a sentient nature, do we originate and con- 
summate all our psychological demonstrations. We find 
humanity to have a comprehension of its psychology only as 
it may move in rational freedom. 

5. Ethical Facts. — In all the foregoing facts of a com- 
prehending reason in humanity, we have been wholly con- 
fined to that region where the physical and rational spheres 
intersect each other, and have found the free personality 
only in the rational as it could make its spring in its own 
interest, and thus always originate action alternative to the 
gratifications of sentient nature ; and yet never rising to the 



FACTS IX FINITE PERSONALITY. 485 

purely spiritual, as wholly independent of a possible or ideal 
nature. ^Esthetic personality stands the lowest in this com- 
plex region ; above the animal, inasmuch as it may contem- 
plate beauty and create in the productive imagination its 
own world of living forms, without any aids or promptings 
of sense, and solely from its love of the beautiful ; but still 
below the purely spiritual, inasmuch as all the pure ideals of 
art must take some form, and be conditioned within a pos- 
sible nature of things. Scientific personality, whether in 
mathematics, philosophy, or psychology, stands higher but 
still within this complex region ; above the animal, for the 
same reason, that it may pursue science for its own sake, and 
make for itself its own subjective system, which shall have 
strict universality beyond all the generalizations of experi- 
ence ; but yet below the purely spiritual, inasmuch as all its 
scientific systems, even in their ideal creations, must be con- 
ditioned in possible nature. The world of taste, though of 
the free originations of the productive reason, must still 
have its artistic product put objective in nature, and holding 
some matter within its living forms of beauty; and the 
world of scientific truth, though a free origination of rea- 
son like art, and higher than art in that it is not conditioned 
to embrace any content of matter, must still be restricted to 
what is possible to be given in nature, and conditioned 
within the determinations of space and time ; and thus both 
beauty and truth, art and science, while possible to be given 
only in the comprehension of a free personality, are yet4n- 
competent to rise into the region of the purely spiritual 
divorced from all the conditions of a possible nature, and 
attain to the dignity of an ethical imperative, which does 
not merely cheer in its own interest but obliges in its own 



486 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

right. There is a comprehension of nature as below human- 
ity, but not a comprehension of humanity itself as both nat- 
ural and supernatural ; sense and spirit. For this purpose 
it is necessary that we be able to rise above the intersection , 
of the two spheres and stand wholly and purely within the 
spiritual. In the play-impulse we rise above the animal ; we 
attain, the interests by which we may cultivate, refine, and 
enlighten savage humanity, and thus effectually lift man 
above his brutal instincts and appetites, and this is surely a 
great achievement and most auspicious beginning ; but we 
do not thus introduce him to the claims of an ethical life, 
and the communings of a spiritual society. Neither the 
beauty of art, nor the truth of science, while they elevate 
him above the physical and the animal, can possibly place 
man among the moral and the immortal. 

But humanity has the facts of an ethical comprehension, 
and which give to it that which is its own as solely the ob- 
ligated and the responsible ; and as higher and more impor- 
tant than any yet considered, it is now especially incumbent 
that we attain a clear view of these facts of an ethical com- 
prehension, and see whether they all come ultimately within 
the colligation of the same law of a free personality ; the 
freedom only so much the higher, as the personality by 
which we encompass the facts is the more exalted. We 
here need, not merely the aesthetic and the scientific free- 
man, and thus the artist and philosopher as person ; but the 
ethic freeman, and thus the sage in his wisdom and virtue. 
We do not here reach to the sanctions of religion, natural 
or revealed, because we are not now in the recognition of 
the absolute, but only the finite personality ; we have a mo- 
rality in the right of humanity, and we here seek for the 



FACTS IN FINITE PERSONALITY. 487 

law of its comprehension. In order to this our hypothesis 
demands in the facts a spiritual or ethical personality ; and 
we need under this last division, this important subdivision 
in our induction — First, the facts which indicate our recog- 
nition of an ethical personality in h umanity ; and, Secondly, 
the facts which evince that we make this ethical free person- 
ality the perpetual and only law of all ethical comprehen- 
sion. 

First, the facts, which indicate the universal recognition 
of an ethical personality in humanity. By this is meant the 
recognition that the human may always figure himself not 
merely as material or animal, nor yet merely as artistic* or 
scientific, but altogether as spiritual in an ethical and 
immortal being ; and thus possessing an end which is 
imperative in its own right, and for its own sake. This 
is seldom explicable even to him who yet manifestly recog- 
nizes such ethical personality. Very often from the de- 
lusive false play of an understanding which may con- 
nect and never comprehend, the very conception of such an 
ethical personality is affirmed to be an impossibility, inas- 
much as it involves an absurdity. And so indeed it would 
be, were the connections in nature's conditioned substances 
and causes our only method of judging, inasmuch as all 
judgments of existence must thus be discursive and never 
comprehensive ; yet we now undertake to adduce some of 
many facts, which indicate the universal recognition of such 
ethical personality in humanity, though quite inexplicable or 
even speculatively denied by him, who, notwithstanding, 
does most unequivocally evince his full recognition of it. 

(1.) An ethical end controlling by an imperative all 
other ends. — A sentient nature with its animal appetite must 



488 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

have one particular course in which its highest gratifications 
in the aggregate will be attainable. This may be found 
from a generalization of experience in a calculation of con- 
sequences, or be given as a revelation from some higher 
source of knowledge. In whatever way attained it is a dic- 
tate of prudence, resting upon the consideration of the 
greatest happiness. Moreover, a sentient nature in the 
midst of other sentient beings, must have one particular 
course for its action in which it will render itself the most 
useful to all others, and so to every being in that commu- 
nity of sentient natures, there is the course for each to be 
the* most useful for all. And whether such a line of action 
be attained by an accurate calculation of general conse- 
quences or by revelation from a higher experience, its course 
is the dictate of benevolence ox public utility, and rests upon 
the greatest happiness of the greatest number. These rules 
of action are conditioned in the sentient system, and are as 
truly facts, things made, as the sentient beings themselves. 
The dictates are made in making the sentient beings, and 
would be changed in any change in the constitutional nature 
of these beings. The sentient being and his system of fel- 
low beings, existing as they do, must of necessity enforce 
such dicta. 

When, then, we put the inquiry — Why be prudent ? the 
answer at once comes from the sentient craving of nature ; 
there is thus the higher wages, in the greater sum total in 
individual happiness. Better make the present or the par- 
tial sacrifice, for the future and the greater gratification. 
And w T hy be benevolent? The answer of a sentient nature 
must be, either that the result of obeying the dictate of 
benevolence will be a fuller stream of gratification, poured 



PACTS IN FINITE PERSONALITY. 489 

back from the many upon the one ; or that it finds within 
itself an appetitive want, which is most gratified in seeing 
others happy. The first is merely prudence in the form of 
beneficence, lending to get more in return ; the last is mere 
kindness, the gratification of a sympathy which craves like 
any other appetite ; and both are conditioned in the necessi- 
ties of a nature of things, on all sides. Nature wholly 
works in and controls the sentient subject ; and nature is 
also the lawgiver, the judge, and the executioner. It is in 
rain to rise above nature by any attempt and question any 
part of the procedure ; either the obedience or disobedience 
of the subject, for a conditioned nature controlled him ; or, 
the legislative, judicial, and executive departments of the 
government, for these are all conditioned in nature. The 
animal is in his action conditioned to the craving of his sen- 
tient nature, whether of any particular appetite or the high- 
est gratification on the whole, and all such craving is neces- 
sitated by the antecedent conditions, and then the ponder- 
ous iron wheel as executive in nature rolls on, crushing the 
imprudent and the unkind. The omnipotence of nature is 
all that can be regarded ; whether in the good or bad for- 
tune of the sentient being ; the dictates given ; or, the 
consequences accruing to each and to the whole. Human- 
ity, in its sentient nature, can never rise to any end other 
than the appetitive, and that is throughout necessitated in 
the conditions of nature. 

But, as aesthetic or scientific, humanity has ends which 
may entirely control those of sentient nature. Merely as 
artist, man may so recognize the baseness of sacrificing 
taste to appetite, and selling beauty for bread ; that he shall 
thereby hold in check any craving of sense, and refuse to 

21* 



490 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

prostitute his genius to any mercenary consideration. And 
merely as philosopher, also, he may so regard scientific truth, 
that he shall hold all the ends of animal nature wholly sub- 
servient to its attainment ; and be so in love with it, that no 
consideration of sensual gratification or sacrifice can draw 
him from it. Without regard to the ethical claim for ve- 
racity, and solely from the stedfast inner adhesion to scien- 
tific truth, Gallileo departs from the bigots who had forced 
him to recant his doctrine of the earth's revolution, still re- 
peating to himself " but it does turn." There may very 
well be so lofty a deference to the interest of reason, that 
the man shall be a willing martyr to the beauty of art, or 
to the truths of science. This is not the sacrificing of one 
gratified want for a greater ; it is a sacrifice of all gratified 
wants, in order not to debase the ends of reason to sense, 
and sell its beauty at a price, and barter its truth for a hire- 
ling's wages. Few, perhaps, may possess so deep and ab- 
sorbing an aesthetic or scientific interest ; but to every 
thinking mind, it is quite manifest how humanity may be 
brought up to such an elevation of rational culture, that all 
of sense shall be made to succumb to the rules of taste, or 
defer to the truths of science. Here, then, is a field for 
freedom ; and the savage, in whom the sentient completely 
reigns, may be brought up into it from his state of brutality, 
and attain to a personality in liberty. But his spring, alter- 
native to the appetites of nature, will be simply the love of 
the beautiful and the true restraining the gratification of the 
agreeable, while he still may know nothing of the ethical in 
its imperatives and responsibilities ; and though elevated 
quite out from the animal, he does not thus attain to a moral 
and immortal existence. 



FACTS IN FINITE PERSONALITY. 491 

But we now turn to a fact which every mind may recog- 
nize, viz., an end in moral character, or worthiness in the 
ethical personality, which wholly subordinates all other ends 
of the sentient or the human being, and makes every want 
of the animal nature and every interest in art and science 
amenable to its behests. It over-rules both prudence and 
benevolence, and commands by a higher imperative than for 
the sake of happiness or of kindness, even from personal 
worthiness, and thus that the action ought to be prudent 
and kind. And this higher end has also rightful sway over 
the whole world of art and science ; and is imperative that 
neither beauty in taste, nor truth in philosophy, shall be pur- 
sued, otherwise than in full accordance with the worthiness 
of the ethical personality. As " the life is more than meat," 
so is the integrity of moral character more than appetite or 
art or science. If any want whatever, or any happiness in 
any degree or duration, or any interest in beauty or truth, 
induce the will into its service as end, so that it shall cease 
to hold the highest worthiness of the ethical personality as 
supreme end ; then is the moral character degraded and de- 
based ; the spiritual birthright is sold for a " mess of pot- 
tage ;" and the soul is forced to blush in conscious shame, in 
the inner witnessing of its own vileness. " The spirit of a 
man will sustain his infirmity, but a wounded spirit who can 
bear ?" Whoso thus saveth his animal life shall lose the 
life of his spirit. This every where recognized fact, of an 
imperative to curb every appetite, and all aesthetic and scien- 
tific interest, by the higher end of an ethical worthiness ; 
and to have no happiness nor beauty nor science in the 
subversion of this ultimate end and right, evinces the 
universal recognition of an ethical personality in humanity. 



492 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

(2.) Ethical affections above all others. — That which 
ministers to the gratification of sentient want is agreeable, 
and that which offends the appetite is disagreeable. Hence 
we often terra one affection or love, and the other hatred. 
In the various ways in which the agreeable and the disagree- 
able apply to our sentient natures, there may be the emo- 
tions of joy or sorrow, gladness or grief, hope or fear, etc., 
and in this manner may arise all the constitutional affections 
which are found in a sentient nature. They are wholly nat- 
ural affections, inasmuch as they are wholly necessitated in 
the conditions of the sensory, and are thus wholly bound in 
a nature of things. Were there nothing in humanity but 
the wants of a sentient nature, all our affections must be 
strictly nature, and stand in their conditioned connections 
like all the successions in the physical world. And, more- 
over, we may apply the beautiful and the true to the play- 
impulse, and awaken the cheerful interest which gives the 
rational pleasures of taste and science and we shall have 
those affections in humanity in which the artist and the phi- 
losopher may participate ; but though these affections are 
awakened in freedom, yet are they all circumscribed within 
nature and conditioned to space and time, inasmuch as these 
pure objects which awaken the affections, though destitute 
of matter, must yet have form, and though above the sen- 
tient must yet abide in the region of the human. To pos- 
sess such affections, in the full perfection of art and science, 
capacitates for no participation in the ethical affections of the 
purely spiritual and immortal. 

But we may bring in here, from the experience of hu- 
manity, an array of facts which evince the full recognition 
of affections that can come from no such parentage. They 



FACTS IN FINITE PERSONALITY. 493 

evince their pedigree from an ethical personality, and in their 
own right take precedence over all other affections. They 
are no result of any application of the agreeable to a senti- 
ent want, nor of the beautiful to an aesthetic or of the true 
to a scientific interest. 

When an occasion for a high degree of sentient gratifi- 
cation presents itself, but with the clear conviction that in- 
dulgence will be followed by a more than counterbalancing 
sentient suffering, then the gratification is forborne from the 
dictate of prudence. When this is all that restrains, the 
only possible affection induced in the experience is the glad- 
ness that so much sentient evil has been excluded, blended 
with a certain measure of self-esteem for the prudential fore- 
sight. But when, in externally similar circumstances, such 
affections as the following are experienced, viz., a conscious 
self-approbation in an act of self-denial and a complacency 
in the review of the act as worthy of my spiritual and im- 
mortal being, and that I must have forfeited my self-respect 
and found occasion to hide my face in shame at my degra- 
dation, if I had done otherwise, we then surely have some- 
thing higher than any dictate of prudence on the ground of 
greatest happiness. It is not the price of happiness in 
greater gratification, but the intrinsic dignity and worth of 
my ethical personality ; and the affection is wholly that of 
complacency in character, not of gladness in so cleverly ex- 
cluding sentient suffering. And moreover, when in some 
period of intense suffering I endure it, and refuse to escape 
from it in the prudential conviction that greater suffering 
would be otherwise unavoidably incurred ; the only affection 
which this can induce is the patience, which comforts itself 
in the wretchedness to which nature dooms me by reflecting 



494 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

that it is better so than to change ; I could only throw off 
this burden to take a greater ; I could not make myself more 
happy by escaping, I am the less miserable by enduring. 
But if now such considerations and affections as the follow- 
ing come up ; it is manly to endure ; it is an honor to hu- 
manity, and an ennobling of character to stand firmly amid 
the severity of these sufferings ; then is it necessary to rec- 
ognize a free personality altogether above any appetitive 
want. All the considerations of happiness in greater grati- 
fication or less suffering are forever banished as mean and 
mercenary, and the sole question is the end of my own 
worthiness — what in the right of the spiritual in my human- 
ity is my duty ? — and whether for a day, for life, or forever, 
I shall, as I ought, stand by my duty to the rights of my 
ethical personality, and bide the blow that any force in con- 
ditioned nature can bring upon me. 

And so, also, when from the dictate of kindness I have 
made great sacrifices to increase the happiness and relieve 
the misery of man, and in which has also been included the 
dictate of prudence in that thus my own greatest happiness 
is promoted, I shall doubtless have a refined gratification of 
sympathetic want in witnessing the fruits of my kindness 
and receiving the pledges of their grateful return, and while 
they enjoy the happiness I have imparted I also enjoy with 
a sweeter relish the happiness that flows back upon me, and 
I find it thus true even in my constitutional nature that "it 
is more blessed to give than to receive." But if, on the 
other hand, I have contemplated humanity as spiritual and 
not merely as sentient, and have had the worthiness and not 
merely the happiness of my race in view ; and if my labor 
and sacrifice has been to win them to virtue, and that the 



FACTS IN FINITE PERSONALITY. 495 

rights and claims of the spiritual and not the appetitive 
wants of the sentient have been my end, and that I can hold 
on my course amid discouragements, and hatred, and perse- 
cution ; and, when at all successful, if I rejoice for virtue's 
sake in their recovered dignity, but when without success, 
and only from the imperative of my personality, if I can 
still persevere in my duty, and find my reward solely in the 
end of my worthiness without one sentient want gratified ; 
then in all this, I recognize a spring to action which can not 
lie in the dictates of prudence and benevolence, and can never 
stand in a generalized self-love nor a kind sensibility, but 
must originate solely in the inner witnessing of the spirit, as 
imperative for its own worthiness' sake. 

If an emotion of reverence ever arises, it has not been in 
the presence of any thing which nature, material or sentient, 
can set forth. I may fear, wonder, and be terrified before 
the working forces in nature, but I can never revere, except 
as I find a personality, which in his own right can hold 
every appetite and affection that nature can awaken subject 
to his own behest, and will not go at their bidding though 
nature do its worst. So if I am affected in remorse, I at 
once distinguish it from regret for some imprudence or un- 
kindness, and feel that it, bespeaks something more than 
happiness lost, even ethical dignity debased and worthiness 
of moral character degraded. I may experience shame in 
my sentient being, if some conditions in nature have made 
me to appear ludicrous.; or, when through mere imprudence 
I have exposed myself to ridicule ; but I well know the dif- 
ference between all such shame, and that ethical debase- 
ment, which blushes even before its own consciouness that 
it has been guilty of subjecting the spirit to the flesh. I can 



496 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

grieve under nature's bereaving calamities, and weep in sor- 
row that I have been imprudent ; but I shall distinguish all 
this from the tears of contrition and penitential sorrow that 
duty has been neglected, and my virtuous character tarnished. 
I know in all cases, the mighty difference between wounded 
sensibility, and violated authority ; a want made empty, and 
a right wronged. And in all such distinctions of affection, 
every man recognizes the existence of an ethical personality, 
which alone can give to such experiences in humanity any 
exposition, and to such distinctions of affection any con- 
sistency. 

(3.) Reciprocal complacency in communion. — Different 
animals herd together, induced by kindred appetites. A 
constitutional want brings man into society, and the cravings 
of nature would be sufficient force for collecting human 
beings into communities. Congenial temperament, the in- 
stincts of consanguinity, common pursuits and reciprocal 
advantages bring different persons together and hold them 
in companionship, and often with much mutual satisfaction. 
Very much of what is termed friendship and love among 
men reposes upon such conditions in nature. But all this, 
operating in its fullest measure, can produce no reciprocal 
complacency. Here are the strongest bonds which the sen- 
sibility may give to social communion ; and still all is appe- 
titive and conditioned by the cravings of nature. 

A higher communion may be cherished in the cultivation 
of similiar tastes, and the study and contemplation of the 
same truths. Art and science, insomuch as they rise above 
sentient wants, give purer interests ; and a communion of 
such pure interest in the same living forms of beauty and 
conceptions of eternal truth, will constitute rational attach- 



PACTS IN FINITE PERSONALITY. 497 

inent far superior to any mutual gratifications of animal 
want. And yet, such a community would be utterly desti- 
tute of mutual ethical complacency. No one would have 
the inner witness of his worth, and the imperatives which this 
imposed, nor could any thing be known of self-approbation, 
or the approbation of others. All communion in spiritual 
personality would be impracticable, for they have not as yet 
waked to the consciousness of such an existence. 

But wholly above all these attachments, we have exam- 
ples of a communion in common rights and mutual claims 
and the fulfillment of reciprocal imperatives, and thus attach- 
ments which strike their root in virtue, and repose upon 
confidence in moral worth and integrity. All men may 
witness acts of virtue, and approve ; but the virtuous will 
be conscious of more than approbation — there will be a com- 
placency and sweet communion of spirit in the whole trans- 
action. Every mind reveres the steadfast good will which 
holds firm to righteousness, and bears up in duty against all. 
inducement and danger; but a vicious mind, though com- 
pelled to respect, will not be pleased with such stern and 
inflexible consistency of character. The example throws 
back upon him the consciousness of his own debasement, 
and awakens self-condemnation, and he will never hold com- 
munion with the rigidly virtuous for virtue's sake. Such 
moral repellency, between the virtuous and the vicious, 
evinces in both an ethical personality ; on one side, a will 
enslaved to the gratification of sense, and on the other, a 
will free in its loyalty to right, but in both a character 
which is estimated by each, and between which there can 
be no reciprocal complacency. 

The . virtuous man on the other hand, knows that his 



498 THE REASON IN ITS -LAW. 

virtue" lies in the valor with which he beats down all the 
contending appetites of the sense, and subjects every end to 
the ultimate claim of his own true dignity. In the society 
of the virtuous, there is a reverential respect of each for 
all ; and, while each possesses an inward self-approbation, 
there is also mutual complacency which can be found in 
nothing but the possession of a virtuous ethical character 
and the recognition of the same character in others. No 
other than a free ethical person can love the virtuous for his 
worthiness' sake ; and none but the ethically go'od, in their 
free personality can be loved by the virtuous. I may value 
as of such a price, that which I may use for my happiness 
or interest; but there is no attaining to the complacency of 
personal communion in this, for the means I use is in that 
very use made thing and not person. A good, as a means 
to an end, is wholly a different good in kind from that which, 
as ultimate end, must be the supreme good. If another per- 
son is good only as means to end ; if the absolute Deity is 
so held as good, only that he makes a heaven of happiness 
for me, then to me he is at once made a thing and has a 
price, and not a dignity which is above and beyond all bar- 
tering. When the reciprocity is only that of happiness, and 
men regard each other only as each is subservient to the 
others' happiness ; or man regards God as only the maker 
and dispenser of happiness, and God regards His creatures 
only as they minister to Him in happiness ; then is it impos- 
sible that the ethical love of complacency should subsist 
between them. A want and not a worthiness is thus put as 
end, and that each were reciprocally useful to each, as joint 
stock co-partners in happiness to be distributed among them 
all, and valued by each only in proportion to his own share, 



FACTS IN FINITE PERSONALITY. 499 

would be the only point of congeniality between them, and 
each would be to others, a thing to be used ; a means to be 
valued for what it could get ; and not a person, who had 
rights in his own intrinsic worthiness, which must be ethi- 
cally respected by all. Reciprocal complacency requires the 
communion of free personality — like with like ethically — 
their rights mutually respected, and their imperatives indi- 
vidually fulfilled ; not each a means to the others' happiness, 
but each complacent in the others' worthiness. 

That we have such facts of complacent communion, and 
that every man is conscious of a capacity for an imperative 
to such communion, is the clear recognition' of his own and 
others' free ethical personality. 

(4.) Capacity to resist all the conditions of nature. 
The cravings of a sensory are wholly conditioned in nature. 
The cravings must be as nature develops, and there is no 
alternative to what nature imposes. The whole sentient life, 
constitutional temperament, physiological propensity and 
native susceptibility, is bound in cause and effect, and were 
there nothing but desire for happiness, there would be no 
alternative to nature's conditions in the experience. A dic- 
tate of prudence, settled by the most comprehensive gener- 
alization, is as truly appetitive as any single want in its sud- 
den excitement. The conditions of nature will determine 
that the prudent judgment shall or shall not be concluded, 
and gratification is sought accordingly. All action from a 
want is as completely one with nature as the flowing and 
ebbing of the tides or the revolving of the planets. Sen- 
tient life must ever more flow in the current of nature's con- 
ditions, and can possibly find or admit within it no spring to 
action as alternative to nature. 



500 THE REASON" IN ITS LAW. 

When, therefore, we recognize any facts which evince a 
capacity to turn and stem the stream of nature's conditioned 
sequences, it is quite manifest that in them we recognize an 
ethical personality in liberty. It is no more manifest, when 
the tempest-tossed ship rides out the storm and maintains her 
steady and safe position against the elements, that her anchor 
holds on to that which stands beyond the contending billows ; 
than that when the good Avill holds firm against all the crav- 
ings of appetite, it has its end above all that a sensory may 
contain. To play off one appetite against another, to stifle 
one want in the stronger craving of another, to hold each 
clamorous passion in subjection by the prudential considera- 
tion of the greatest gratification of all, is still to be only in 
nature. It is merely using one part of nature as a defense 
against another part, or the whole of nature against any 
particular interference. But, when all of sentient nature is 
setting in one direction, and an inner witness of what is due 
to the worthiness of an ethical character puts its imperative 
prohibition to the attainment of any such end ; then, is the 
ethical end wholly out from the sentient end, and the ethical 
right gives a spring to control the sentient want, and an 
alternative is afforded to nature's conditions by putting a 
sovereignty over nature, and giving to sentient want a mas- 
ter that in his own right may subject and control it as a 
whole and forever. Should it be said, after all the fair 
appearance there may still be some secret want or pruden- 
tial consideration, that is controlling the whole sentient 
nature beside, as an o'ermastering craving ; we should then 
at once appeal to any man's own consciousness of either 
what is, or of what ought to be, in his own case ; and such 



FACTS IN FINITE PERSONALITY. 501 

facts of consciousness are at once the recognition of the 
ethical personality. 

Thus, you have yourself been thrown into circumstances, 
where all the inclinations and tendencies of sentient nature 
were in one direction, and appetite and example and oppor- 
tunity were all in combined impulse towards gratification. 
But there sprang up the irrepressible witnessing within — I 
ought to resist, and turn back this whole tide of appetitive 
desire, and stand firmly uncompliant. And here the ques- 
tion is — Whence this ought ? Surely not from any portion 
of the sentient nature ; not from any aesthetic or scientific 
interest ; it is the claim of some ethical sovereignty, as imper- 
ative over appetite and taste and philosophy, and holds the 
agreeable, the beautiful and the true in science, subordinate 
to the good and the right in morals. Nothing can possibly 
awaken this conviction of obligation but the inner witnessing 
of a right, and never the mere craving of a want. All of 
appetitive want may thus be combined, and yet the counter 
conviction may come that I ought, and therefore that Jam 
able even when I do not, to resist every impulse of the sense, 
and stand unswayed by all the promptings of constitutional 
desire. The consideration of time, how long such subjec- 
tion of gratification shall be maintained, has no possible 
relevancy ; the end of ethical worthiness is supreme for all 
possible period. Nor, has the consideration of the degree 
of trial and sacrifice any pertinence; the highest possible 
susceptibility of a sentient nature is still to succumb to 
the worth of ethical character. All that a sensory in its 
keenest craving and most passiouate want can sacrifice 
may be demanded in the right and for the rational end 
of the spiritual excellency ; and thus an imperative may 



502 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

fix an obligation to resist nature, great as the trial may- 
be and long as it may endure. The firm will, in its ethical 
integrity, is thus capacity for standing against nature in all 
her force. Let her do her utmost, and I may still be firm 
and unyielding ; let me be crushed beneath her iron condi- 
tions through all my sentient being, and I may still say, in 
obedience to the end of my own worthiness, that I will go 
down to death in the integrity and loyalty of my good will 
and pure conscience. 

Even in the degradation of the spirit to the lowest 
depravity, and the submerging of all imperative beneath the 
raging tide of passionate gratification, the man is still com- 
pelled to the conviction, that he has put himself under the 
domination of nature in the flesh by his own consent, and that 
this degradation is not misfortune but guilt, and that he 
ought to break the chain of his sensuality at once, and come 
out from his foul and noisome prison-house, and stand up in 
manly valor and virtue, with the free and the good. He is 
conscious that while his appetites are of nature, there is a 
nobler part of his being which is not bound in the conditions 
of nature. He can take hold of what is beyond all of 
nature's conditions, and stand thereby in steadfast resist- 
ance to every thing which would degrade and enslave him, 
and for the sake of his dignity trample on all of happiness 
which collides with duty. This the virtuous man knows as 
achieved in his righteous integrity; this the vicious man 
knows as claimed in his conscious responsibility ; and in this 
is the full recognition of a free ethical personality, whose 
right is above all the ends which any conditions in nature 
may propose. 

Here are now sufficient facts for the evincing of a uni- 



FACTS IN FINITE PERSONALITY. 503 

versal recognition of an ethical personality in humanity, and 
this prepares us for the remaining consideration in the induc- 
tion of ethical facts, viz. : 

Secondly. — That we make this ethical personality the 
only compass, by which to comprehend all the facts that are 
moral in humanity. The successive events in the flowing 
stream of nature around us, as the seasons, the weather, the 
alternations of day and night, the growth arid decay of 
vegetation, etc., how much soever they may affect us favor- 
ably or unfavorably, we never call ours as if we had any 
responsibility in originating them. We always refer them 
to an agency quite above and beyond all that is human. The 
changing events in the physical world affect mankind, but 
are never brought within the compass of humanity, as if 
they belonged to it, or were at all comprehended in it. 

So also with the changing wants and craving appetites of 
our sensitive nature. We may call these ours inasmuch as 
they come within the unity of self-consciousness, and take 
place on the field of our experience; yet we never appropri- 
ate them to our personality and consider them as compre- 
hended within our agency. They are the affections which 
nature within and around us works upon us, in which we 
are passive, and not that we in any sense originate them. 
That I am cold, or hungry, or sleepy, and desire to gratify 
or relieve these craving wants is nature's work on the field 
of my sensibility, and not my work, as originating in my 
purpose, and carried out according to my intention. I 
hold myself to be wholly irresponsible therefor, except as in 
some act of liberty, I excite or control the executive acts 
which gratify them. The promptings of self-love, though 
generalized to the broadest dictates of prudence or kind- 



504 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

ness, are wholly pathological and bound in the necessity of 
nature's conditions. The brute and the man, as animal 
solely, move in the same lines of conditioned appetite, and 
take or leave the objects of gratification according to the 
craving want, or as controlled by the teachings of experi- 
ence. We never comprehend such facts in the compass of 
any responsible personality. 

Moreover, we create our own forms of beauty, or con- 
struct our own pure diagrams in geometry, or connect our 
primitive conceptions in a philosophical system, and we may 
call these productions of art and science ours, in the accep- 
tation that they are the works of our rational genius. "We 
comprehend them within the compass of an aesthetic or 
scientific personality in humanity ; but inasmuch as all such 
products are not within the region of spiritual rights and 
behests, we shall never here recognize the claims and imper- 
atives of moral obligation and responsibility, nor attempt to 
comprehend the beauty of art nor the truth of science in an 
ethical personality. 

But, there are facts, which evince that man is in himself 
an ethical whole ; a moral world ; self-separated from all 
other things and persons. As each man has his own, so hu- 
manity in the aggregate becomes a comprehensive total as 
human responsibility and obligation. Here is excluded all 
the facts of a merely sentient existence, and all of taste and 
science, inasmuch as none of these are bound up in the im- 
peratives which originate in what is due to the spiritual and 
immortal in humanity. 

Every man's virtues and vices are his own, in a meaning 
wholly other than that his appetites are his own ; and 
wholly other than that his productions in the fine arts, or his 



FACTS IN FINITE PERSONALITY. 505 

attainments in science, are his own. They are his, in that 
they are wholly comprehended in himself; and their origi- 
nation, and final intent are compassed in his ethical person- 
ality. That voluptuous indulgence, which has not merely 
brought pain and loss from its imprudence, but far more has 
induced conscious debasement and remorse, must the guilty 
man say, is all my own in its entire moral and responsible 
being. That selfish counsel given to another ; that decep- 
tive and ensnaring influence ; that tempting solicitation ; 
that dishonest intention and matured plan of wrong-doing ; 
that perverse and perpetuated immoral habit ; that malicious 
slander, or profane speech, or licentious publication ; that 
unholy deed, and that wicked lie ; all are in my own con- 
sciousness confined to my personality ; and it were quite 
vain for me to attempt to shrink from a full and final ac- 
count. 

So also, on the other hand, that firm purpose and decided 
adherence to principle ; that disregard of all allurement and 
threatening in the line of duty ; that good counsel on vir- 
tue's side ; that cheerful sacrifice of pleasure for the right ; 
all have had their origin in my personality ; and are deeds, 
for which none but myself can be conscious of a complacent 
serf- approbation. They have dignified and adorned my char- 
acter, and in them no other personality can participate. 
These deeds of vice or of virtue have gone out and mingled 
with the facts of nature, and become linked into the condi- 
tioned series of physical causes and effects, and spread 
abroad their baneful or beneficial influences ; but they did 
not come of nature, and can not be transferred from myself 
to any of the necessities in nature. They must forerer 
stand to my account, and come back to me for their origin 

22 



506 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

and final design. And thus with every man ; he separates 
all that is his from all that is nature's or another person's, 
and thus comprehends his own in himself, and as proper per- 
son with his own deeds stands self-isolated from all else ; 
and neither nature, nor his fellows, can be made to share in 
his responsibilities. What nature has wrought within him 
or thrown upon him and what another person as mentor or 
tempter has done, he puts entirely distinct from his own 
agency, and thus takes his own, and stands forever and com- 
pletely absolved from all that is not his own. 

In this, and in this only, is the comprehension of human 
morality. Every man owns as his, and at his responsibility, 
that which has origin and direction from his ethical person- 
ality ; and he can be made to own as his no other events be- 
side. His personality in liberty is the only compass by 
which to include his responsibility ; and the morality of the 
human race can only be comprehended in that which is ethi- 
cal personality as habitant in humanity. Sentient craving is 
nothing but conditioned nature working in man ; beauty and 
truth have an interest above appetite, but can not give im- 
peratives nor awaken responsibilities ; the end of his . own 
worthiness and dignity, as moral character, gives the inward 
witness by which he knows himself and his own. 

And now, in conclusion we say, that all the facts under 
all the foregoing heads are fully held in colligation by this 
invariable law of comprehension. On the whole field of hu- 
manity, we never comprehend any portion of its facts in 
their origination and consummation, except as we bring 
them completely within the compass of a free personality. 
Whatever in human experience is conditioned in material 
nature, or in sentient nature, we never attempt to compre- 



FACTS IN AN ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY. 507 

hend, except as we ascend to the comprehension of nature 
itself. It is found in human experience, only as this is sub- 
jected to necessity ; and hence its comprehension if attained 
at all, must be brought within the compass of a personality, 
which is sovereign author of humanity itself. In this sec- 
tion of comprehended facts in human experience, we have our 
invariable hypothetical law ; that we comprehend nothing, 
which we may not bring within the compass of a personality 
in liberty. We have yet to carry out the same hypothesis 
over the facts in a comprehension of nature itself, and this 
we will effect in the next section. 



SECTION II. 

THE FACTS OF A COMPREHENDING REASON WHICH COME 
WITHIN THE COMPASS OF AN ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY. 

In the previous section we determined the fact of a uni- 
versal recognition of a free personality in humanity, and that 
all comprehension of the products of humanity was wholly 
by the compass of this free personality. We rise from na- 
ture, and find that which is not conditioned in nature, and 
comprehend this in an author and designer. The artist is 
rational and free person, in that the love of the beautiful is 
spring for an alternative agency against all the appetitive 
wants of sentient nature, and thereby all the productions of 
an artistic taste are comprehended in the compass of the 
aesthetic personality in humanity. The philosopher is ra- 
tional and free person, in that the love of the true is spring 
for an alternative agency against all craving want, and 



508 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

thereby all the attainments in science are comprehended in 
the compass of the philosophic personality in humanity. 
The moral agent is rational and free person, in that an ethi- 
cal imperative is spring for an alternative action to all sen- 
tient want and all aesthetic and scientific interest, and thereby 
all moral character and responsibility are comprehended in 
the compass of the ethical personality in humanity. A com- 
prehending reason thus actually comprehends all the products 
of humanity, aBsthetic, scientific and moral, as facts in human 
experience, solely by the compass of a recognized free per- 
sonality. 

It is much to have thus found that the facts of compre- 
hension, so far as they lie among the products of humanity, 
are all in complete and perpetual colligation by this law of 
a personality in liberty. We never comprehend within the 
products of humanity any events, which we do not at the 
same time recognize as within the compass of a free human 
personality. Whatever is bound in the conditions of nature 
though appearing on the ground of human experience and 
coming within the field of human consciousness, is at once 
attributed to nature and not comprehended as within that 
world of events which humanity originates, and for which it 
must stand accountable. 

But, therefore, we have the facts of comprehension only 
amid the products of humanity. Each person is compass 
by which we comprehend all that is his ; and all persons 
constitute all of humanity, and in the aggregate compass by 
which we comprehend all the creations of man ; and if any 
facts should disclose themselves as the product of angelic 
agency, such events would in the same manner be compre- 
hended within the compass of angelic personality. In this 



PACTS IN AN ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY. 509 

way, however, we could attain to but a very partial induc- 
tion of the facts of a comprehending agency. Very few of 
the events in nature can be considered as the product of 
either human or angelic personalities. Take away from the 
series of conditioned causes and effects in nature all the 
events which have found their origin in humanity and may 
be comprehended within the compass of human personali- 
ties, and though such subtraction would give abundant 
manifestation that nature had been much modified and 
indeed augmented in the stream of her flowing sequences 
by man yet would that which was taken bear but a very 
small proportion to that which would still remain. These 
modifications of material nature would not at all reach to its 
primitive substantial space-filling force. The essence of 
nature would be found to be neither increased nor dimin- 
ished, inasmuch as the products of man's creation are never 
any distinguishable physical forces, which may fill space with 
new substances or superinduce upon existing matter new 
organizations. 

We have, therefore, occasion for many facts of a com- 
prehending agency in the origination and consummation of 
events in nature, which can by no means be brought within 
the compass of any human personality. Indeed, our grand 
object is to determine the law of a comprehending reason in 
reference to nature herself, and we have only dwelt upon 
the facts of a comprehending reason within the products of 
humanity, in order to show that as the actual law is here 
also the same, we might thereby have the more abundant 
confirmation, that this one hypothesis of a personality in 
liberty holds all facts of a comprehending agency every 
where within its colligation. We shall make it our object in 



510 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

this section to show that all comprehension of nature has 
this one law, the recognized compass of a free personality, 
as the author and finisher of all that is thus comprehended ; 
and wherever such encompassing personality is recognized, 
there do we at once comprehend all the events in him. 
Since the events are of nature, and not the product of any 
finite personality, it follows that we must take it for our 
hypothesis that all such comprehension of events must stand 
within the compass of an absolute personality. We shall, 
therefore, find it convenient to pursue this order of induc- 
tion — First, to induce such facts as show a universal recog- 
nition of an absolute personality above nature ; and Secondly, 
to induce such facts of a comprehending reason for nature, 
as shall evince that all operation of comprehending nature is 
by the law of this absolute personality. In this last division, 
inasmuch as we have both a physical and an ethical system 
as universal, it will be necessary to have this sub-division of 
facts for the law of comprehension, first in the physical, and 
secondly in the ethical universal system. 

1. Facts evincive of a universal recognition of an Abso- 
lute Personality. — There are many facts which show that 
the human mind readily recognizes a personal author and 
governor of nature, and it is only from the influence of per- 
verted speculation that such recognition comes to be dis- 
carded. Humanity is not Atheistic except as deluded. The 
conviction that there is a personal God above and Lord of 
nature, would be perpetual and universal except for the 
paralogism induced in the antinomy of the connections of 
the understanding and the comprehension of the reason, of 
which more notice will soon be taken. This is not the place 
for an ontological argument demonstrative of the actual 



FACTS IN AN ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY. 511 

existence of a personal Deity ; we seek now only to estab- 
lish this conclusion, that the human mind readily recognizes 
such a being, and that the conviction is not discarded except 
through a process of speculation which may be easily exposed 
in the very sources of its fallacy. 

(1.) The ready assent to the fact of final causes in 
Nature. — The common and most satisfactory basis of 
Natural Theology is the universal conviction of final causes 
in nature. . The evidences of adaptation to ends are so nu- 
merous and so prominent, that no observing mind fails to be 
impressed with the conviction, that there has been an intel- 
ligent design in such adaptations. The argument, accumu- 
lative with every fact of adaptation, is at first satisfactory 
and convincing to every apprehending mind. It is when we 
begin to speculate upon the process of proof,, and examine 
the conclusiveness of such argumentation, that we lose the 
force of this first conviction and may pass through all grades 
of skepticism to a confirmed infidelity. The speculation 
does not at all weaken the evidence of adaptation to ends in 
nature, but it obscures the conviction that such facts may 
be made demonstrative of a personal Deity. When we 
examine these connected adaptations more closely, we find 
them all conditioned in their sequences, and the succeeding 
to be necessitated by the preceding and the on-going of 
nature a perpetual series of link in link without alternative. 
The means to an end now future were themselves end to be 
reached by former means, and how are we to leap in our 
conclusions, from this linked necessity every way shutting 
us within its fixed connections to some independent and free 
personality as an original designer ? 

Instead of the phenomenal adaptations connected in their 



512 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

conditioning causes, we may assume that an intellectual 
attribute which we call intent or design, appears as element 
in this combination ; and we may then take that intellectual 
element as the fact from which to conclude upon an absolute 
and free maker and designer of all things. But we shall 
still have the same endless chain of conditioned sequences. 
There is design, as intellectual element, in the arranged 
wires of the carding-machine, and this may be deemed suffi- 
cient proof for an intelligent designer. But when I see that 
busy little iron hand, with astonishing precision, bending 
and cutting the wire and puncturing the leather and exactly 
inserting the card-teeth, I find here the intellectual element 
higher up in the development of sequences and conditioning 
in necessity what is below it. How shall I leap from the 
conditioned mechanism to the free personality. The man 
makes the iron hand that makes the card ; but that man 
again is an adaptation as means to such an end, and in his 
wants and interests and circumstances as much conditioned, 
it may be, to make card-teeth machines, as such machines 
are to make cards. In the man then is now found the intel- 
lectual element conditioning all that follows. But I need a 
designer adapting the man to his sequences, as much as in 
the former case I needed the man adapting the machine to 
set card-teeth ; and then, when I find the designer of the 
man in his adaptations, I shall find the intellectual element 
there, and yet shall be no nearer to a demonstration of an 
origin of all design in a free personality than when I began 
with this design in the arranged wires of the carding- 
machine. It is ever design apprehended only in some already 
conditioned connection, and I can not leap from conditioned 
result to a free originating personality. 



FACTS IX AN ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY. 513 

It is thus with every form of argumentation on the basis 
of final causes. That which seemed so conclusive at first, 
when speculatively examined fails utterly to reach any con- 
clusion. The regressus is ever with an open backward way, 
and when pushed, the understanding must perpetually tread 
back from one conditioned to a higher condition, and never 
reach its origin in an unconditioned. It is thus that all 
teleological proof of the existence of a personal Deity must 
fail of a demonstration, because it is impossible that the pro- 
cess should rest in other than an arbitrary conclusion. The 
personal designer , is surreptitiously assumed because we 
rationally need him, but not at all because we logically find 
him. But, when we now know the clear distinction between 
a connecting understanding and a comprehending reason, 
we can at once free ourselves from all the delusion and par- 
alogism of such speculation. Reason demands an absolute 
and can rest in nothing else, for it can possibly comprehend 
nothing except in this compass of a free personality ; but 
an understanding forbids all such origination, and can possi- 
bly conclude in connected judgments only through the 
medium of perpetually underlying and interlinking condi- 
tions. The very idea of a personality in liberty is an absur- 
dity to the discursive faculty, and to which the conception 
of a deity can possibly be none other than the notion of a 
substance filling all space, and in its causality working 
through all time, and connecting within itself all the condi- 
tioned phenomenal changes in nature. The reaching forth 
of the comprehending reason, and the short-coming of the 
connecting understanding utterly forbid that we should put 
the two faculties at work together, or one for the other, and 
suppose that their results may be brought concentric with 

22* 



514 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

each other in the same sphere. If we would attain to the 
personal Deity of a comprehending reason, we must not 
delude ourselves with the folly, that such can be measured 
in the connections of a discursive understanding. The dis- 
cursive faculty can not move at all without its media of sub- 
stance and cause, and when it thus moves it must be from con- 
dition to conditioned ; how then may it assume to determine 
any thing about the originating of space-filling substances 
and time-abiding causes ? It is quite as incompetent to deny 
any thing about free personalities as to prove any thing. It 
can not say how substance and cause may begin to be, but 
as little can it say that they may not begin, and have their 
origin in a free personality. It is wholly impertinent to this 
faculty, that it should meddle at all in the questions of final 
causes and free originations, and ethical personalities. The 
sense might as well attempt to perceive the essential force 
which connects the phenomenal universe. Neither is com- 
petent to affirm or deny beyond its own legitimate province. 
We may at once therefore, utterly disregard all these de- 
lusive speculations of a discursive judgment ; and if they 
are found wholly incompetent to comprehend the adaptations 
in nature, by the compass of a personal Deity, so also are 
they wholly incompetent to exclude the possibility of such 
comprehension, and deny the actual being of a personal God 
of nature. The ontological demonstration may hereafter 
come in its proper place, but enough is here given to show 
that the conviction of final causes in nature should not be at 
all weakened or modified from any speculations which 
are manifestly so preposterous. And yet, all such recogni- 
tion of final causes is, in the fact itself, the recognition 
of a free personality above nature. A final end to be at- 



FACTS IN AN ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY. 515 

tained in and by nature involves an overruling and a using 
of nature for some personal intent, and in that mind, the 
recognition of a personality independent of and absolute 
over nature. To such a mind "the heavens declare the 
glory of God and the firmament showeth forth his power." 
" The invisible things of him from the creation of the world 
are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are 
made, even his eternal power and Godhead." 

(2.) The recognition of miraculous interpositions in 
nature. — It is not contrary to, but quite in accordance with 
the convictions of mankind generally, that there should be 
miraculous interpositions. All skepticism in reference to the 
competency of human testimony for the proof of miracles is, 
as in the case of final causes, a result of delusive specula- 
tions. Deny that philosophy can reach beyond experience 
and generalizations from experience, and we shall then have 
nothing but the connections of an understanding, and can 
not conceive where a miracle should come from. ~No amount 
of human testimony can rise to as high a source of convic- 
tion against the uniformity of nature and for the miraculous 
interposition, as is given in universal experience against the 
miracle and for the uniformity of nature. The very basis 
of all philosophical conviction underlies the belief of the 
uniformity of nature ; but the credibility of a miracle has 
only testimony, which all experience shows may be fallible. 
An assent to the fact of a miracle, therefore, on any amount 
of testimony is credulity, and a philosopher should be 
wholly above it. And, surely, if we keep this philosophy, 
there is no alternative to this skepticism in reference to all 
testimony for a miracle. That a Deity is assumed, who may 
control nature miraculously, can be only through the same 



516 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

credulity ; for all science is wholly within the generaliza- 
tions of experience, and no experience, however generalized 
can reach beyond nature, but must ever run up and down 
the interminable sequences of her conditioned connections. 

But we may readily pass by all this when we have 
learned the antinomy of the two operations of a connecting 
understanding and a comprehending reason. If we will ad- 
mit nothing but the logical conclusions of a discursive con- 
nection, then verily are we shut up within nature, and the 
testimony of such as might rise from the dead could not 
avail to carry us beyond nature's linked successions. But ii 
we have attained the complete idea of a comprehending rea- 
son, then nothing forbids that we should readily cherish the 
common conviction of miraculous interpositions. 

Without canvassing the testimony for the validity of any 
specific miracle, in this place, it is sufficient that we show a 
ground in philosophy for such conviction when properly 
substantiated by testimony, and we may then take such 
common recognition of the fact of miraculous interpositions 
as involving the recognition of an absolute personality above 
nature. I do not at all apprehend, in any recognized 
miracle, that nature has violated her own laws of connec- 
tion, and that any distinguishable forces in nature have of 
themselves broken away from their fixed order of develop- 
ment ; for this would not merely transcend, but contradict 
the laws of an understanding. I conceive of a new event 
put into nature, which did not come from any previous con- 
ditions in nature, but from wholly a supernatural source. 
Nor is this new event such as might originate in a finite per- 
sonality, as when by human volition changes are made in 
nature, which do not come of nature but of our free person- 



PACTS IN AN ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY. 517 

ality. The new event has its source ab extra from all na- 
ture's conditions, and is also such a counteraction of nature, 
as evinces a power superhuman over nature. Opening blind 
eyes, and unstopping deaf ears, and healing the sick, and 
raising the dead, and controlling the elements, and thus di- 
rectly overpowering nature in her own causal operations by 
a direct counteracting of her flowing conditions ; these and 
such like events alone rise to what we mean by miraculous 
interpositions. Nature may then receive these new events 
and incorporate them within her own conditions, but they 
began to be in nature from no paternity of nature, and had 
their genesis wholly from a superhuman source. 

And now we affirm the fact, that the human mind read- 
ily admits that such interpositions have occurred in nature, 
and it is only from a delusive speculation that skepticism 
arises while a complete philosophy sustains such conviction ; 
and such conviction involves the recognition of an absolute 
personality ; a will in liberty; unconditioned by nature and 
having a sovereign control over nature, and which may 
make new things or annihilate old things in nature at his 
pleasure. It is not nature at work upon herself, nor anomo 
lous and monstrous originations in nature ; but it is a hand 
from without thrust in sovereignty within, and modifying 
and making and extinguishing the forces of nature as it 
pleases. Such conviction can not be, but in the recognition 
of an absolute and free personality. 

(3.) The order of nature's for matio?i, as given in Geo- 
logical Facts. — Here we meet with no speculations of a de- 
lusive philosophy to obscure or deny the facts themselves, 
but we take them as nature has left her own record of what 
has been done within her upon her own successive pages, 



518 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

and iii legible characters and a meaning unmistakable. The 
facts to which we here refer, and would present in the most 
comprehensive manner, are as follows. Repeated convul- 
sions from deep subterranean forces have in frequent in- 
stances broken through the solid crust of the earth's sur- 
face, and turned out the edges of these upheaved strata to 
our view, which have their dip of a greater or less inclina- 
tion to the horizon, according to circumstances. These ex- 
posed strata are the leaves of nature as a book, and contain 
the memorials of past historical occurrences through a long 
series of many and diversified geological epochs. 

In the reading of this record backward from the present 
all traces of man's existence on the earth cease to appear, 
when we pass the accumulations of a few feet of soil upon 
the surface. Comparatively slight modifications of the allu- 
vial deposits, or more violent and extensive changes of dilu- 
vial action which yet do not mark any deep convulsion, are 
alone contemporaneous with the history of man's abode 
upon the earth. 

Passing these we come to the tertiary formation, and 
have commingled strata of sand, clay and lime of a thou- 
sand feet in thickness. The remains of animals of existing 
species are here found in large numbers, and yet such are 
constantly diminishing as we go down, until in the lowest 
formation of this series, very few traces of the existing 
forms of animal life now on the earth there appear, while 
their places are filled by strange fossils of many different 
and now wholly extinct species. 

The secondary formation succeeds, and we have the 
chalk beds of a thousand feet depth in which no fossil shell- 
fish and only one animal is found of the present existing 



FACTS IN AN ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY. 519 

types of sentient being. We find next the oolite formation 
of half a mile in thickness, deposited by subsidence from 
rivers and seas alternately, and in this we lose utterly all 
traces of any existing species of animated nature, and * 
among other new forms we encounter here the strange and 
monstrous saurian remains. The new red sandstone of two 
thousand feet comes next ; and this followed by the coal 
formations of many thousand feet in depth, the carbonized 
remains of the immense vegetable productions of an older 
world, and in which no plant of present forms appears, nor 
is there any indication that any fowl then existed or any an- 
imal roamed through these primeval forests. Here are in- 
terposed, between the coal-strata, limestone formations of 
great thickness, not as the sepulchres of fossil shell-fish, but 
the remains in mass of myriads of testaceous or coralline 
animals. We come next to the old red sandstone forma- 
tions many thousand feet in depth, and which are an aggre- 
gate of older rocks fractured and decomposed and promis- 
cuously put together by successive depositions, and contain- 
ing such organic remains as there lived and died, but which 
have left no successors among the latter fossil species. 

Deeper and earlier than all these, come the primary for- 
mations. The Silurian system here has place for a mile and 
an half in depth, with its hundreds of animal species utterly 
extinguished in its own stratifying process, and their petri- 
fied remains testifying to the long cycles in which successive 
species one after another came, and ran through their re- 
spective generations, and then utterly ran out of being for 
later types of new organizations. Then we reach the Cam- 
brian system of nearly equal thickness of old slate rock, 
and in which the fossil remains of animal life are much di- 



520 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

minished, and admonish us that we are coming to an age 
more solitary than the places of death and of graves, even 
to periods when sentient life had not yet a beginning. 

The Cumbrian formation receives us still lower down, 
and here we stand with all the generations of life above us, 
worlds on worlds which have for countless ages slept in 
death, and read around us only the records of material na- 
ture ere life was given or death began its reign. Mica schist 
in stratifications of many thousand feet, are given ; and then 
gneiss formations bring us down below the records of all 
stratifications ; and the crystallizations of the solid granite 
deeper than we can penetrate, tell us only of the fusing 
fires beneath ; and the leaves of nature's book are all sealed 
up from mortal eyes beyond. A region of ten miles in 
depth below the surface has thus been explored, and we can 
here deliberately trace the history of nature's operations, 
and the interpositions occurring in its own successions with 
unmistaken certainty and precision ; through every foot of 
which there must have been the passing away of geological 
ages, to have, sufficed for their accumulations. 

Whatever the geological epochs, there is the evidence 
that antecedently to all accumulation in regular strata by 
any subsidence, there "was in action the antagonistic force of 
attraction and repulsion, ensphering the mass about a com- 
mon center ; and also that the distinguishable forces of heat, 
and electrical and chemical agencies were superinduced, 
without at all subverting the original space-filling substance 
in its causality. Matter had thus chemical combinations as 
the development of such forces, and above these the crys- 
talline force is superinduced, and thus as preparatory to or- 
ganic productions material existence is brought into form, 



FACTS IN AN ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY. 521 

and its conditioned changes run on in the development of 
causes and effects, and nature works itself out in the action 
of its intrinsic forces. Attraction and repulsion, bipolar 
forces, chemical affinities and crystalline agencies have their 
inner conditions, and their inter-working necessitates their 
resulting products. But neither of these distinguishable 
forces can carry their action beyond their own inner condi- 
tions. Gravitation can not act as caloric or electricity, nor 
can they act as chemical affinity and crystallization. By so 
much as the higher force conditions the working of the 
lower is there a superinducing of the higher upon the lower, 
and it were no more absurd to say that the lower originated 
in an utter void, than that the higher originated from the 
lower. By so much as it is higher and controlling it is a 
superinduction, and the excess to have come from the lower 
must have originated from utter emptiness. No distinguish- 
able force can do more than develop its own rudimental 
being, and thus nature can never go out of herself as she is 
and bring into herself new and higher forces. All superin- 
duction can be no development from inherent endowment, 
but must be causation imparted by an ab extra interposition. 
Crystallization overacts chemical affinities and gravitating 
agencies without extinguishing them, and could not thus 
have found its genesis from them, but must have been super- 
induced by some agency beyond them ; and so in turn with 
all distinguishable forces, which shall overact crystallization, 
or any succession of such forces as shall one overact the 
other. 

We may not, yet at least, be able to read from this book 
of geological records the fact that nature in her distinguish- 
able forces was successively brought into being, and that 



522 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

the superinduction of one force upon another, in simply- 
physical organizations, was with interventions of long geo- 
logical periods. We may confidently affirm that the lower 
could not beget the higher, but we can not affirm that they 
were successively superinduced, nor deny that nature began 
with the combination of the gravitating, chemical and crys- 
tallizing forces. As yet we have nothing but probabilities 
from analogy, to guide us in our conclusions higher up in 
geological periods than the originations of vegetable organi- 
zations. Though the probabilities are all the other way, yet 
we will not here decide that the crystallization of the granite 
mass, and the action of heat and electricity, and magnetism, 
may not all have been coeval with the force of attraction 
and repulsion in the space-filling substance. But whether 
contemporaneous or successive, their combination is no iden- 
tification of these forces. They are as readily distinguish- 
able from each other as if we had them in isolated action, 
and we can distinctly determine the parts which each per- 
forms in the formation of the physical structure of our globe. 
In this combination of agency, distinguishable through all 
its superinduced elements, we may now leave the considera- 
tion of the times of superinduction to some further study of 
the record, and merely apprehend, in the causality induced 
by the overacting and controlling of the higher with the 
still perpetual operation of the lower forces, that the subter- 
ranean fires, and the crystalline rocks, and the half fused 
gneiss formations, and superimposed depositions of mica- 
schist, would be a necessary result of the conditioned devel- 
opment. Nature would put on her conditioned forms, and 
take her conditioned positions, and pass along in condi- 



FACTS IN AN ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY. 523 

tioned locomotion, and have her conditioned changes, from 
the action of her own forces. 

But, after all this, we have a sure and clear record of 
successive interpositions. We can very legibly read what 
has been done since such forces had brought the merely ma- 
terial development through its preliminary stages, and it is 
to these results, as far more important now for our purpose, 
that we give a more special attention. Indefinite geological 
cycles passed round in the inward action and onward devel- 
opment of physical forces, and the onward series of cause 
and effect induced their combinations and cohesions, and the 
heat gave its molten masses, and the crystalline forces ar- 
ranged the firm and deep granite beds, on which the entire 
geological superstructure through all its varied strata re- 
poses ; and yet periods of incalculable duration passed by, 
while the primitive gneiss rocks were attaining their consol- 
idation and position, and while still later the mica-schist was 
being deposited ; but at length a point in the ongoing of 
nature's conditioned changes is reached, where we have her 
record that what had never yet appeared, and what could 
not be begotten from all that nature was — a new and higher 
force than any yet in action — began its being and its mani- 
fest control, over the other forces on which it had been su- 
perinduced. In some shallow of the primitive ocean, where 
the broken and triturated particles of this primeval world 
had been accumulated by the forces then in action, wholly a 
new force is at work ; and, overruling other forces for its 
own uses, it is building up forms and combinations of phe- 
nomena unlike all that nature has before known. A field of 
marine algce^ the product of a vital force, which organizes, 
and energizes through all the . organization of root, stock, 



524 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

branches and leaves, is in its first existence. The germin- 
ating life begins while yet through nature no parent stock 
or seed is found ; and the plant expands and matures, and 
while the primitive organization falls and is utterly decom- 
posed, this vital force still lives on in the ripened germ, and 
propagates itself in its undecayed energy in the newly 
shooting plant. Thus vegetative life begins, and runs on its 
course through all the following generations of that species 
of the sea- weed. 

"Whence, now, is this new force in such controlling 
action? It has just come into nature, and over-rides the 
other material forces, and is itself source for all these new 
phenomena, but whence is it ? Gravitation, chemical arid 
crystallizing forces, all say it is not in us, and can not have 
been brought out from us. It is their superior, and uses 
them and modifies them for its own ends. That it should 
be deemed some genesis of nature is absurd, for nature has 
till now known no causality which could reach so high and 
control so far, and by so much as it exceeds all former force 
in nature, it must thus have originated from an utter void ; 
and which is just the same impossible supposition, as if all 
nature were deemed the offspring of an utter negation of all 
being. It has been superinduced upon nature, and has thus 
become an addition to nature, and can therefore only be a 
creation from some being supernatural. And yet so per- 
fectly is this new force superinduced upon all the other 
forces which it uses, in the harmony of its conditioned and 
conditioning operation, that it is quite manifest this hand, 
which interposed and put it into nature, is the same hand 
which intelligently holds and guides all nature. We have 
not before been able to open the book to the record of 



FACTS IN AN ABSOLUTE PEESONALITY. 525 

nature's beginning, but all has been developed nature, 
stretching back to a beginning we have striven to find, but 
could not reach. Here we find so much of nature as ve^e- 

o 

table life begins to be, and so in harmony with all else of 
nature that it uses without extinguishing its other forces ; 
and we recognize in it a supernatural personality, who is 
absolute for it, and for all of nature. And here also, we 
may see that the evidence for this recognition of an absolute 
personality accumulates through all the succeeding epochs 
of geological formations. The primitive forces of gravita- 
tion, cohesion and crystallization act on, and the new vital 
force controls them and perpetually reproduces itself in har- 
mony with them through all its propagations; but, with 
the vital force as essential being for one marine plant, we 
can have in nature only its generations and in its own kind. 
This vegetative force is conditioned to its own organizations 
and can build up only its own phenomenal structures, and 
can never go out and originate a new species of organic life. 
Each new species of vegetable life is a new force in nature, 
more emphatically so for animal, and onward from the lowest 
orders of testacea or corraline existence up to the highest 
species of the mammalia. A new superinducing of beings, 
upon that which nature before possessed, is effected in each 
case; and as it did not come out of previous forces of nature 
in their conditioned development, so in each case, we have 
a new recognition of thafr same personal and supernatural 
interference which, out of nature, puts into nature what he 
pleases. 

We come along up from this great depth to which we 
have descended *and reached the lower sepulchres in which the 
earliest dead lie entombed, and from thence we pass along 



526 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

by the myriads of once living beings preserved in their 
forms beyond the skill of all embalming, while at every step 
of our ascent we pass above entire species of animals, which 
had run on through many generations and then died out 
utterly in the extinction of the race, and another put anew 
within nature as its successor in time but without any genea- 
logical connection. One form of sentient nature has thus 
been built up by a distinguishable vital force, which has 
propagated itself through all its generations and occupied 
its geological era, and that entire organic energy has ceased 
to act and its kind become extinct ; and other species have 
in like manner been successively put anew within nature, 
and each has recorded its type of being in form and locality 
and habitude on the spot where its generations came and 
went, and we can as readily determine the originations and 
extinctions of the species as of the individuals themselves. 
New forms of life begin and end, sometimes in the same 
geological formations and sometimes perpetuated through 
successive strata, and these followed by others to become 
themselves in turn extinct, and thus nature has from the 
beginning of animal and vegetable life, been replenished by 
repeated and successive creations. Among the last products 
of his forming hand we find the book of nature like the 
record of Moses, to teach that man was made by God in his 
own likeness, and that his origin is a very recent date com- 
pared with the geological cycles since other and lower types 
of sentient beings began. "What, in all cases of these super- 
induced forces of vegetable upon material, and of animal 
upon vegetable being, was there in the lower which should 
beget the higher? What, when one species became extinct, 
that should be the genesis of another widely different species? 



FACTS IN AN ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY. 527 

What, in all that existed through nature, could rise so high 
as to give birth to man, when there Avas yet no human pro- 
genitor ? As well might all nature rise into being from an 
utter void of all being at once, as to rise by progressive 
steps, with each addition an origination from a void of all 
being beyond what nature then contained. Over and over 
again we here recognize in these legible records of a super- 
natural interposition, which has put into nature tnat which 
nature yet had not, the existence of a free personality wholly 
unconditioned by nature. 

(4.) The recognitio?i of a free personality in humanity. 
We have before found that this is a universal conviction, 
and that the personality comprehends all that is moral in 
humanity and for which man is held by himself to be respon- 
sible. This we are convinced did not come of nature, inas- 
much as it is competent to resist nature, and to distinguish 
its own originations from the conditioned successions of 
nature, and thus stand forth with its own in separate unity. 
Still this free finite personality is recognized as in combina- 
tion with nature. The free force of the reason as spring of 
action in the right of its own dignity, is the power of will ; 
and yet, while this may ever stand in resistance to all the 
wants of its sentient nature, it may never wholly separate 
itself from that nor prevent the appetitive wants from coming 
frequently in collision with itself, and can maintain its sover- 
eignty only by perpetual vigilance and valor. The person- 
ality is habitant in sentient nature, and has the prerogative 
of an end above nature, and thereby an imperative to main- 
tain its dominion over nature, but with all this prerogative 
above nature, it can not break up its combination and stand 
forth wholly pure from nature. Humanity is ever animal as 



528 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

well as rational, and it can not exclude nature's wants from 
colliding often with its own ethical end, but only prevent 
such colliding wants, when they do and will intrude, from 
attaining the mastery. Nature, both without and within 
the human sensory, keeps on in her own unbroken succes- 
sions of cause and effect, and the human will can not stop 
this, but only exclude her dominion within its own sphere. 

Thus is it manifest that the human personality did not 
come of nature, since it may wholly exclude all domination 
of nature's conditions over it ; and as manifest is it that 
nature did not come of it, for it can no otherwise free itself 
from nature than by excluding not by annihilating nature. 
It is a distinguishable energy superinduced upon nature, 
and as controlling nature in its own right is a power above 
force, competent to hold itself free from all external force 
and to hold in subjection ail the inner forces of its own sen- 
tient nature. 

Personality in humanity is not, therefore, deemed to be 
a higher force in nature superinduced upon existing lower 
distinguishable forces, as when the force of heat overrules 
gravity without extinguishing; but this personality as 
power of will is itself supernatural even in its superinduc- 
tion upon nature. We recognize in this, not a new physical 
force, but an ethical personality as absolute above nature, 
who not only originated nature through all its superinduced 
forces in succession one above another, that the highest 
might physically control and use all the lower, but also 
crowned the whole with a supernatural in his own image, that 
this finite personality might ethically control and use all of 
nature for its own worthiness' sake, while itself should be 
subject only to the absolute dignity in the personality of its 



FACTS IN AN ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY. 529 

author. In this author of human personality is universally 
recognized the absolute ethical personality of a Deity, who 
may originate not merely distinguishable forces superinduced 
upon some grand central antagonist force, but who must be 
of right the grand center of the whole ethical sphere, and 
have made both the physical and the ethical systems for his 
own worthiness' sake. 

2. The fact of a comprehending operation for univer- 
sal nature is only by the compass of this Absolute Person- 
ality. — Taking the universe of being, we have the material 
vegetable and animal worlds as purely physical existence, 
and wholly bound in the conditions of a nature of things. 
Their entire onward development is wholly necessitated 
from their primitive rudimental being, and all in combination 
as one universe had one fixed series without an alternative.. 
We have in this universe of being, also, the complex exist- 
ence of the sentient and the rational in humanity, and thus 
the human race so involved in the conditions of a nature of 
things, that in their constitutional being they belong to the 
same physical system, and must be comprehended within 
the compass of the same author and designer. We need 
thus here to see the fact of a comprehending operation of 
reason for the entire universe of being, material, vegetable, 
animal and human. This human has moreover its personality 
in liberty, and is thus ethical being ; and in the end of its 
own intrinsic dignity and worth, the human personality must 
stand in moral alliance with all ethical beings in their per- 
sonality ; and we shall thus have an ethical universal system, 
including all free personality. We need, therefore, to see the 
fact of a comprehending reason for an entire ethical system, 
in its separate and comprehensive imperatives. We have, 

23 



530 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

then, to attain the facts for a comprehension of both a phy- 
sical and an ethical universe. And here, in each case, the 
hypothesis is, that we never effect such comprehension except 
by the compass of this absolute personality which we have 
found to be universally recognized, and never even specula- 
tively discarded but by a delusive paralogism which is now 
readily exposed. We will here take them up in their order. 
(1.) The comprehension of the Physical Universe. — 
The comprehensive agency performs its operations only by 
the compass of an author and finisher. If a true and pro- 
per beginning be not reached, then no act of a comprehend- 
ing agency can commence. All is left to the conditioned 
series of cause and effect, evermore reproducing itself in 
every repetition. And when a proper origination is attained, 
a designed consummation must also be apprehended, or the 
work of comprehension can not be completed. It is begin- 
ning and progress with no aim, having no end to be reached, 
and no goal of perfection to be attained ; " a mighty maze 
and all without a plan." Such encompassing author and 
finisher is found only in this recognition of an absolute per- 
son, as the God and guide of nature and the sovereign of 
the moral universe. 

This is manifest abundantly, from the facts given in any 
direction where this conviction of the human mind, that 
there is such an absolute personal Deity, has not been dis- 
carded or in any way lost. If the rational in man has 
among any savage people, been as yet so little developed 
that the recognition of an absolute personality has not yet 
been reached, then has there to such a rude and barbarous 
tribe been no comprehension of any thing in nature ; of 
nature as a universe ; or of any ethical system. If through 



FACTS IN AN ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY. 531 

a delusive speculation, such original conviction has been dis- 
carded, there has at once been lost all rational comprehen- 
sion of the universe. Whence it came? and whither it 
tends ? have been questions not only unanswerable to such, 
but in the discarding of all encompassing in a beginning and 
consummation, such questions are without significancy. 
We might as well ask whence come and whither tend the 
passing periods of time, for nature's connections are thus 
made as aimless and endless as the conditioned successions 
of indeterminate durations. No Atheistical system ever 
attempts to comprehend the universe. Nature comes, it 
knows not whence ; and moves onward, it knows not 
whither. If it talk of laws and principles in nature, its 
talk is all absurdity ; for its laws have no law-giver and its 
principles no principium. If it seek to generalize these 
laws and principles and make its God of the aggregate, and 
thus atheism change to Pantheism y it is only to change the 
absurdity of its language, for such an aggregate is still 
evermore made up of parts, and the parts can neither find 
nor make the one that shall comprehend the whole. No 
Polytheistic scheme can give an encompassing author ; for 
each god is tutelar deity for but his own region, and all are 
in perpetual contention, until some recognized God of all 
gods harmonizes the whole, by encompassing the whole in 
his originating and consummating control. A Manichean 
theory, of two original sources of all being, is but just so 
far comprehensive as its assumed personality encompasses ; 
and light and darkness, the good and the bad daemon, divide 
the universe between them, and all is eternal conflict, except 
one be expelled in the supremacy of the other. No intellec- 
tual comprehension of universal nature has in fact ever been 



532 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

made, where the comprehending reason did not encompass 
all from beginning to final end in one absolute personal 
Jehovah ; and wherever such recognition of absolute per- 
sonality has been attained, there, as a matter of fact, has 
universal nature ever been comprehended in him as sole 
author and finisher thereof. The law in the facts of all 
comprehension of nature is the recognition of an absolute 
and free being, and the process of all comprehension in the 
fact is in precise correlation to all such comprehension in the 
a p)*iori idea. 

(2.) The comprehension of the Ethical System. — Man 
is conscious of perpetual imperatives, and that there are 
perpetual moral obligations that must rest upon the race. 
It is not difficult to take the convictions of obligation, grow- 
ing directly out of the inward witness of what is due to 
the dignity of man's rational and spiritual being, and find a 
perfect ethical system every way complete and comprehen- 
sive in its own autonomy. The existence of the ethical 
persons will itself originate the imperatives as universal 
moral law, and the control of the law universally will be 
the consummation of the moral government. This will 
include only such imperatives as may be made universally 
binding, and in which we may readily come to see that 
which should be, without regard at all to the enquiry, now, 
whether that which should be actually is. It is for the 
facts as imperative that we here seek, and not for the facts 
as they may be existing in real life. 

Humanity in its ethical personality, is spring for control- 
ling all the appetites of its sentient nature. They should 
in all cases be held so subject and the good will in each per- 
son should ever reign sovereign over desire. As separate 



FACTS IN AN ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY. 533 

persons the highest imperative would be, the preservation 
of the integrity of moral character, which is found in mak- 
ing and keeping the ends of the sentient subservient to the 
end of the rational. The maxim for each person must be — 
do that which is due to the dignity of the person, in the 
complete subordination to it of the wants of the animal. 
This is the duty of each person, and hence it is due as a 
right in each person, that no other person be allowed to 
interfere, and endanger its continuance. As social beings, 
therefore, each having imperatives in the right of his own 
personality, and thereby the right to an unhindered com- 
pliance with such imperatives, the maxim for each must be 
— do nothing that shall infringe upon the freedom of another 
in his compliance with the imperatives of his own person- 
ality. Such individual maxims thus made into law universal 
would be thus expressed — respect thy own rights and 
regard the liberty of thy neighbor in his rights. All rights 
originate in the intrinsic dignity of personality, and all 
imperatives originate in rights ; and thus all rights and all 
duties at once exist in the existence of human society, and 
the sum of all law for such society is found in the above 
maxim made into law universal. From this, by analysis, 
may be derived every private and social duty, but which it 
is not necessary should be here formally drawn out. The 
entire community in the aggregate would attain the consum- 
mation of a human society, by the control of such universal 
law. The aggregate would become an organic, whole in 
systematic unity thereby. Each person, as component ele- 
ment in such a society, would be both end in himself, and 
auxiliary to the end of all, sustaining his own worthiness 
and contributing to the universal dignity. The social body 



534 THE KEASOX IX ITS LAW. 

would be altogether without schism, and the functions of a 
healthy life going on in every part. In the social system of 
humanity this ought so to be ; and then the whole stands 
out in its completeness under the directory of its own law 
and blessing itself in every part through the perpetual 
results of its own action. 

Such a consummation is no mere conception arbitrarily 
created. That humanity is in social being, is ground suffi- 
cient to induce the universal conviction, that such a consum- 
mation ought to be. The imperatives originating in its own 
being give the claim for such an ethical system in its origin 
and consummation. All should thus act from the maxim 
which is imperative as law universal ; and all so acting, the 
aggregate worthiness and blessedness is attained, and virtue 
and moral self-complacency reign in every part. It is right- 
eousness rewarding itself according to its merit in its own 
results. 

But that which ought to be, will not be, when any one 
person has violated a right and introduced sin into the sys- 
tem. This one violation reaches through and breaks in upon 
the rights and the complacency of the whole. All have a 
righteous claim upon every other that they each fulfill the 
law universal, and that no one shall be as " a broken tooth 
or a foot out of joint." And when such offending member 
introduces his disturbing and colliding moral action, it is 
the equitable claim of the whole, that the delinquent and 
all his deranging action be at once excluded. But it ought 
not to be that his exclusion be merely topical displacement, 
as the removal from a material machine of some part broken 
or become rotten. Remorse and shame is the sinner's due, 
and the moral disapprobation of all the holy, perpetually 



FACTS IN AN ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY. 535 

made manifest toward him, is the righteous demerit of the 
guilty. The light, in, which he ought to regard himself as 
lost in dignity, is precisely the light in which all others ought 
to regard him ; and his retribution of shame, self-reproach, 
and public abhorrence is as imperative, as the approbation 
and complacency for the virtuous. 

And still further, the sin and colliding agency of one 
does by no means release any other from the imperative of 
the law universal, but each is bound to the same integrity 
of character personally as before the unworthiness of one 
had been introduced. And here then begins an evil which 
the action of the system can not in itself remedy. The im- 
peratives remain, but the bliss of all is marred. Even such 
as are firmly loyal to the right rule feel the colliding influ- 
ences of the sinner, and their freedom and rights and bless- 
edness are impaired. The system can not repair itself in its 
own action. An intruding evil has come in which it can not 
eject. The system must still work on under its imperatives, 
but it will now perpetually and forever work wrong. 

And so, precisely, we find the facts to be. They are not 
in human society as they should be. What ought to be is 
not, and the ethical system is perpetually contravening its 
own imperatives, and perpetuating moral inconsistencies 
which it can not itself redress. The retribution of the 
wicked, and the exclusion of their colliding influence is not 
as from its own imperative it ought to be. That which is 
differs far from that which should be, and the perpetual on- 
going is a perpetuation of wrong-doing. In such a state of 
facts all comprehension of an ethical system were impossible. 
That has come in which should not have originated, and that 
consummation which should be is unattainable. The fact as 



536 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

it is has no satisfactory origin or end, as ethical system. It 
stands itself, in its own working, abhorrent to the moral 
reason and conscience it embodies ; and is an ethical blot, 
eternal and irremediable in its own helplessness of all self- 
cleansing. 

And here, the question is, how comprehend the ethical 
system in humanity as we find it, marred, perverted and in- 
corrigible from its own action ? We can comprehend an 
ethical system as it should be very readily ; since the exist- 
ence of the human society would itself originate the rights 
and the imperatives, and the fulfillment of the law universal 
would be its consummation ; but it is a very different fact of 
comprehension when the ethical system is already perverted 
and in itself helpless and hopeless of all restoration in its 
own movement. How such perverted ethical system origi- 
nated ? how be consummated ? is now the problem. In 
what way is the operation for comprehending an ethical 
system effected, as the system is in its depravity ? And to 
this, the answer is universal, both as negative and positive. 
"No Atheistic or Pantheistic system ever did or ever can 
comprehend an ethical government over human beings in 
their depravity, by accounting either for the origin of sin, 
or for the recovery of the race from it. All Theistic sys- 
tems ever have made such a comprehension, by encompass- 
ing all with the hand of an absolute moral governor from 
the inception to the consummation; and in some way re- 
ferred to Him, in the perfection of His wisdom, the sove- 
reign disposal of all that the moral government involved. 
Under the administration of a Divine Sovereign, has the 
human race been created, and the ethical relations and re- 
sponsibilities established, and the sin and disorder have 



FACTS IN AN ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY. 537 

come in and will be so controlled as at last to work out a 
consummation worthy of his dignity, and corresponding to 
every claim that his subjects may righteously lay before his 
throne. Whatever may now be hid, in the darkness of his 
inscrutable dealings, is only mystery to the finite subject ; 
" God is his own interpreter, and He will make it plain." 
Thus, and thus only, has there ever been effected any com- 
prehension of an ethical system in depraved humanity. 

It might be very easy to show here, that the provisions 
of the Gospel scheme of Redemption are precisely adapted 
to the interests of reason in effecting such an ethical com- 
prehension, and that the divine interpositions have been 
wholly regulated by the behests of God's own worthiness 
and dignity. It behoved him so to interfere and no other- 
wise in the permission, the overwhelming and restraining, 
the expiation, pardoning, and punishing of sin. On the 
christian ground of a moral government, its comprehension 
is in complete conformity with every fact of man's ethical 
responsibility and God's righteous sovereignty. Man in his 
freedom should have been no otherwise restrained ; God in 
his holiness should have no otherwise interposed. But our 
whole work in determining the fact and the law of a com- 
prehending reason, for an ethical system as it is in fallen hu- 
manity, is completed in this, that we now see that it has 
never been attempted except upon Theistic grounds ; and 
that in the recognition of an absolute personality as moral 
governor, whether without or with the light of a divine 
revelation, the moral system with the sin and evil in it has 
ever been held, as in some way having a rational origination 
and ultimate consummation. 

Putting thus together all the facts of a comprehending 

23* 



538 THE REASON IN ITS LAW. 

agency, whether on the limited field of humanity, or of a 
divine operation in nature, or of a divine government over 
an ethical system of fallen beings, and finding in all that the 
only law is that of a free personality, and that without such 
compass of a personality in liberty no comprehending as 
fact is any where given, we have an induction sufficiently 
broad for deducing the general law of all comprehension ; 
and this law in the facts is the precise correlate of the a 
priori idea of all comprehension, and thus gives science to 
the operation of reason. We have as demonstrative a 
science, for an intelligent comprehension oi universal human- 
ity and universal nature, as for the connection of phenom- 
ena into a nature of things, and for the conjunction of the 
diverse in quality into definite phenomena. We have thus 
the science of our entire intellectual being, including the 
functions of the Sense, the Understanding, and the Reason. 
This is all that we have proposed to ourselves, and in this 
we have a complete philosoj^hy of the human mind — a Ra- 
tional Psychology. 

We understand the universe in the space-filling forces 
that constitute it, and which in their substantial being and 
causal action determine all sense phenomena. We compre- 
hend the universe in the activity of a personal spirit who 
creates and governs it. He is the author of nature, and of 
the common space and time of nature, and is thus himself 
absolved from all the conditions of nature and of nature's 
space and time ; and in this he is the Absolute. The Abso- 
lute can not be understood, for all the conditions which 
give law to logical thought are wholly impertinent, and all 
the conditions which give unity to the judgment are insig- 
nificant when applied to Him. He can not be comprehended 



PACTS IN AN ABSOLUTE PERSONALITY. 539 

by any finite intelligence, for He is the absolute compass 
comprehending all things. He can be rationally appre- 
hended as a Spirit in His self-activity, self-law, and liberty, 
by all rational beings, and is thoroughly known only to him- 
self; " the things of God knoweth no man, but the spirit of 
God." To the understanding which would ask how God is, 
we say, " Canst thou by searching find out God ? canst thou 
find the Almighty to perfection ? It is high as heaven, what 
canst thou do ? deeper than hell, what canst thou know ?" 
To the Reason which has its insight into nature, " his eter- 
nal power and Godhead are clearly seen," and to the reason 
only does revelation disclose the being of God. We thus 
know that he is, and what he is, but can determine nothing 
whence and how he is. 



22* 



APPENDIX TO THE REASON. 



AN ONTOLOGICAL DEMONSTRATION OP THE VALID BEING OP 
THE SUPERNATURAL. 

A comprehending Reason in its process of operation 
has now been fully obtained both as subjective idea and 
objective fact, and in this is a complete science of the reason 
as faculty for comprehension and in which we conclude our 
examination of the whole field of Rational Psychology. 
As in our completed science of the sense which is faculty 
for conjunction, and also of the understanding which is 
faculty for connection, we found the data for an ontological 
demonstration of the valid being of the objects given in each 
faculty, so here it may be expected, that the science of the 
reason will furnish the data for an ontological demonstration 
of the objects cognized by it in its functions of a compre- 
hending agency. These are the finite personality in human- 
ity ; the absolute person as author and governor of nature ; 
and the consummation of his final end of a universal system 
in some future state of moral existence. Our whole work 
will thus be concluded in this outline of a demonstration for 
the valid being of the supernatural, in the several respects 
of the Soul, God and Immortality. From what has pre- 
ceded, a bare statement is sufficient. 

1. The valid being of the Soul. — The conception of the 



VALID BEING OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 541 

soul as an existence which is supernatural includes more 
than living and sentient being, and a higher capacity of 
action than from any promptings of appetite or general 
judgments of greatest gratification deduced from experi- 
ence. All this is conditioned and held in necessity by some- 
what that has gone before, and is thus bound in the linked 
connections of nature, and through its most subtle analysis 
or in its highest generalization can be but nature still, mak- 
ing no possible approximation towards the supernatural. 
There must be an existence which is ethical, and which in 
the right of its own personality may act independently, and 
in liberty, and feel a conscious responsibility for such action. 
Is there a process of demonstration for the valid being of 
such Soul ? 

Two sources of argumentation may be taken. 

(l.) The fact of a comprehending agency. — Neither a 
conjoining nor a connecting agency could attain the concep- 
tion of an operation of comj^rehension, much less that 
either could actually comprehend. An acting liberty, as 
rational personality, can alone comprehend any thing as 
having a proper origin and consummation. The fact there- 
fore, that man comprehends nature in the compass of an 
absolute personality is demonstration that he is Soul. 

(2.) The facts ccs given in an ethical experience. — Were 
there the conception of an ethical personality as soul some- 
how attained, still no mere ideal of the soul could give the 
actual facts of its rational agency. The following, among 
other facts, are in actual being — imperatives controlling all 
appetites ; affections above all sentient emotions ; reciprocal 
complacency between moral personalities ; and more espe- 
cially a capacity to resist all the conditions of nature and 



542 APPENDIX TO THE REASON. 

stand firm on the ground of duty — and the fact that man 
has such experience is proof that he is Soul. 

2. The valid existence of God. — There are three lines 
of demonstration. 

(l.) The fact that all atheistic specidations are from the 
antinomy of the discursive facidty as understanding, and 
which have been shown to be delusive. — This delusion 
removed, the teleological argument for an author and gover- 
nor of nature, derived from the traces of design in nature, 
remains irrefragable. 

(2.) The fact of new forces originating in nature. — 
Such facts have been before given, and could not come of 
nature. "No mere conception of a God could give such 
facts. The facts are, and they demonstrate that a God is. 

(3.) The fact that an ethical system is in being. — This 
has beforehand been made manifest. Such ethical system 
can neither originate from nor be controlled by any thing 
in nature. That it is, is demonstration that an absolute 
ethical person as moral Lord and Judge exists. 

3. The validity of the SouVs Immortality. — The exist- 
ence of humanity is itself origin for the rights and impera- 
tives in an ethical human system. Obedience universally to 
these imperatives is a consummation of the system in its 
perfection. But as fact, the law universal is not kept. 
The moral system is thus in its depravity, and if left to its 
own action its consummation in its moral perfection is quite 
hopeless. What ought to be certainly will not be, from the 
system's own action. Is there then any way of demonstrat- 
ing the consummation of a moral system, and in this, demon- 
strating that the soul shall be immortal ? 

The process is as follows. The truly virtuous man has a 



YALID BEING OF THE SUPEENATUEAL, 543 

righteous expectation of happiness ; and his hope rests upon 
an imperative that his blessedness be equal to his merit. 
The vicious ought to anticipate misery equal to his demerit. 
The virtuous and vicious ought so to be placed, that the 
wickedness of the one shall not interfere with the liberty, 
endanger the virtue, nor diminish the bliss, of the other. 
The virtuous have not, however, what they might hope for ; 
the vicious have not what they should fear ; and the action 
of the bad perpetually annoys the good. If what ought to 
be is to be, an ethical sovereign must make it so to be. 
And unless morality is a figment, and all our ethical experi- 
ence a chimera, such a consummation must some way be 
effected ; hence, on this ground alone a strong faith in the 
being of God, and of a future state, might be cultivated. 
But at the most it would be faith, and not science. There 
would be facts in our conscious imperatives showing what 
ought to be, but we could not thus reach the facts for demon- 
strating, that what ought to be in fact will be. But if now 
we add what has already been attained, in the ontological 
demonstration of the actual being of a God, then we have 
sufficient for a conclusive proof. God is ; a future state of 
rewards and punishments ought to be; the existence of God 
is a guarantee that what ought to be surely will be. God is 
ethical goodness, and it is impossible that He should deny 
Himself. It is thus infallible that the soul shall live on in its 
obedience and bliss, or in its disobedience and misery, for- 
ever ; and also, that the time must come, when the separa- 
tion of the righteous from the wicked shall effect the designed 
and demanded consummation of the moral system. 




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